BV  4310  .M2 

1922 

McDowell,  William 

Fraser, 

1858-1937. 

This  mind. 

BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

GOOD  MINISTERS  OF  JESUS  CHRIST 

A  MAN'S  RELIGION 


arfte  iHenbcntjaa  lecturesf,  Cigbtf)  Series 
Belibereb  at  BcJ^autD  l^niljersitp 


THIS  MIND 


WILLIAM  FRASER  McDOWELL 

One    of   the   Bishops  of   the 
Methodist  Episcopal  Church 


'Have  this  mind  in  you,  which  was  also 
in  Christ  Jesus" 


THE  METHODIST  BO(JK  CONCERN 
NEW  YORK  CINCINNATI 


FOREWORD 

The  Mendenhall  Lectures  of  DePauw  Univer- 
sity, to  which  this  series  of  addresses  belongs, 
was  founded  by  the  Reverend  Marmaduke  H. 
Mendenhall,  D.D.,  of  the  North  Indiana  Confer- 
ence of  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church.  The 
object  of  the  donor  was  to  found  a  perpetual  lec- 
tureship which  would  bring  to  the  University  as 
lecturers  "persons  of  high  and  wide  repute,  of 
broad  and  varied  scholarship,  who  firmly  adhere 
to  the  evangelical  system  of  Christian  faith.  The 
selection  of  lecturers  may  be  made  from  the  world 
of  Christian  scholarship,  without  regard  to  de- 
nominational divisions.  Each  course  of  lectures 
is  to  be  published  in  book  form  by  an  eminent 
publishing  house  and  sold  at  cost  to  the  faculty 
and  students  of  the  university." 

Lectures  thus  far  published  under  this  founda- 
tion : 

1913,  The  Bible  and  Life,  Edwin  Holt 
Hughes. 

1914,  The  Literary  Primacy  of  the  Bible, 
George  Peck  Eckman. 

1917,  Understanding  the  Scriptures,  Francis 
John  McConnell. 

1918,  Religion  and  War,  William  H.  P.  Faunce. 

7 


8  FOREWORD 

1919,  Some  Aspects  of  International  Christian- 
ity, John  Kelman. 

1920,  What  Must  the  Church  Do  to  Be  Saved? 
Ernest  Fremont  Tittle. 

1921,  Social    Rebuilders,    Charles    Reynolds 
Brown. 

1922,  This  Mind,  William  Eraser  McDowell. 


PREFACE 

The  Mendenhall  Lectures  for  1922  at  DePauw 
University  were  prepared  and  spoken  with 
the  desire  that  they  might  really  assist  members 
of  the  student  body  in  making  their  decisions  for 
lifework  and  service  in  the  world  to  which  they 
are  so  rapidly  coming.  The  lectures  are  not  a 
plea  for  youth  to  enter  the  ministry  or  mission 
field,  though  such  a  discussion  would  have 
pleased  the  lecturer.  He  desired  in  this  course 
to  state  as  clearly  as  he  could  some  of  those  prin- 
ciples which  should  govern  young  people  facing 
their  life  decisions  and  lifework  no  matter  what 
their  particular  calling  is  to  be.  For  it  seems  to 
thoughtful  students  of  our  age  that  a  new  conse- 
cration of  life  in  all  occupations,  a  new  testing 
of  life  in  all  callings  by  the  principles  of  Jesus 
Christ,  and  a  new  reference  of  life  to  his  mind  or 
attitude  toward  it  are  imperatively  called  for,  if 
individual  life  itself  or  the  human  world  is  to  be 
saved.  This  will  explain  the  method,  the  treat- 
ment and  the  spirit  of  the  lectures. 

It  is  hoped  that  the  printed  volume  may  be 
useful  to  young  people  in  the  supremely  critical 
and  important  period  when  they  are  deciding 
what  they  will  do  with  their  lives.     If  it  helps 

9 


10  PREFACE 

them  to  make  their  decisions  in  the  light  of  Jesus' 
life,  to  have  in  themselves  toward  their  lives 
the  mind  that  was  in  him  toward  his  life,  the 
author  will  be  content.  He  will  have  no  doubt 
or  fear  as  to  the  outcome.  It  is  hoped  that  the 
small  volume  may  be  useful  also  to  pastors  and 
teachers,  to  the  advisors  of  youth  in  Student  Con- 
ferences, Young  People's  Institutes,  Student 
Volunteer  meetings,  colleges,  high  schools, 
churches,  Sunday  schools,  and  elsewhere  where 
young  people  are  seeking  advice  and  counsel  on 
this  vital  subject. 

It  is  especially  hoped  by  the  lecturer  that  the 
volume  may  assist  and  guide  parents  in  their 
relation  to  their  children's  decisions.  Here  is 
a  real  difficulty.  Many  parents  are  actually 
standing  in  the  way  of  their  children's  decision 
according  to  the  mind  of  Christ.  Real  parental 
interest  and  right  are  carried  often  far  beyond 
their  proper  limit  into  the  realm  of  the  life  de- 
cisions of  their  children.  Many  students,  known 
to  me,  have  been  prevented  from  the  acceptance 
of  what  has  seemed  a  clear  call  of  the  Master 
because  their  parents  have  had  other  plans  for 
them.  We  older  people  are  quite  likely  to  think 
that  our  right  to  control  life  covers  not  only  our 
own  lives,  but  the  lives  of  our  children  and  grand- 
children. .It  is  my  conviction  after  years  of 
observation  that  the  principles  here  stated  should 


PKEFACE  11 

govern  parents  in  their  attitude  to  their  chil- 
dren's lifework,  just  as  truly  as  they  should 
govern  the  attitude  of  the  young  people  them- 
selves. It  is  a  serious  thing  for  parents  to  set 
their  own  wills  and  preferences  in  opposition  to 
the  evident  will  of  God  for  their  children's  lives. 
Those  parents  who  have  run  with  the  will  of 
God  and  the  highest  desires  of  their  children  in 
their  response  to  it  have  had  the  largest  joy  in 
the  outcome.  If  the  Master  wants  the  son  or 
daughter  of  any  parents  reading  these  lines,  for 
any  service  anywhere  in  the  world,  let  the  Master 
have  his  wonderful  way.  His  wish  is  the  suffi- 
cient motive  and  reason. 

It  would  have  been  a  pleasure  to  add  a  lec- 
ture showing  from  the  actual  lives  of  other  men 
and  women  how  they  have  responded  to  the 
Master's  wish.  Maybe  in  some  future  time  such 
an  addition  may  be  made,  either  in  this  book 
or  outside  of  it.  How  did  Frederick  W.  Robert- 
son, Phillips  Brooks,  Henry  Drummond,  James 
Chalmers,  Alice  Freeman  Palmer,  William  H. 
Baldwin,  Dr.  William  T.  Grenfell,  and  others 
come  to  the  decisions  that  led  them  into  the 
lives  they  led  and  the  work  they  did?  How  did 
Jesus  Christ  get  his  chance  in  such  lives? 
Through  what  perplexities,  over  what  difflculties 
and  oppositions,  under  what  influences  did  these 
and  others  reach  that  final  determination  that 


12  PREFACE 

led  to  such  commanding  results  in  their  lives? 
Maybe  it  is  just  as  well  that  no  attempt  is  made 
here  to  show  the  experience  of  individuals.  May- 
be it  is  better  that  in  colleges,  schools,  confer- 
ences, institutes  and  other  groups  young  men 
and  women  should  by  their  own  reading  kindle 
their  lives  at  the  fire  of  these  other  lives.  Of 
this  I  am  certain,  that  the  youth  of  this  day 
and  succeeding  days  will  not  come  to  their  true 
place  of  life  or  service  in  the  world  except  as 
they  walk  in  the  spirit  and  light  of  those  im- 
mortal souls  who  have  struck  step  and  kept  step 
with  the  Master  of  all  good  life  and  work. 

I  am  under  great  obligation  to  my  dear 
friends,  the  Reverends  James  C.  Baker,  William 
J.  Davidson,  John  R.  Edwards,  Victor  G.  Mills, 
and  Oscar  T.  Olson,  for  reading  the  manuscripts 
before  the  lectures  were  presented  at  DePauw, 
and  for  making  many  most  valuable  criticisms 
and  suggestions. 

And  my  gratitude  to  the  faculty  and  students 
of  DePauw  and  the  people  of  Greencastle  for 
their  cordiality  and  kindness  during  the  three 
days  when  the  lectures  were  being  spoken  is 
deep  and  lasting.  Above  all  I  am  grateful  for 
the  enlarged  satisfaction  that  this  new  study  of 
the  manifold  life  of  Jesus  has  brought.  His 
meaning  for  life  is  an  evergrowing  wonder  and 
splendor.    What  it  may  grow  to  when  it  has  full 


PREFACE  13 

opportunity  in  human  life  does  not  yet  appear. 
What  human  life  and  service  may  become  when 
Jesus  Christ  is  perfectly  formed  in  them,  or 
when  they  have  put  on  Christ,  we  may  see  in  some 
new  revelation  of  life  even  in  our  day.  Perhaps 
that  is  our  next  great  spiritual  adventure  and 
achievement.  The  fellowship  of  Jesus  in  life 
decision  and  life  service,  the  sharing  of  his  prin- 
ciples and  purposes,  the  identification  of  per- 
sonal life  with  him,  and  the  merging  of  it  into  his 
seem  to  me  to  be  youth's  supreme  advantage  and 
privilege. 


THIS  MIND  TOWARD  LIFE'S 
DECISIONS— I 

One  of  our  minor  pleasures,  in  certain  moods, 
is  the  cheerful  business  of  putting  together  pic- 
ture-puzzles. The  exercise  calls  into  activity 
several  powers,  such  as  the  sense  of  shape  and 
color,  patience  and  imagination,  and  the  ability 
to  visualize  a  cosmos  in  the  presence  of  a  chaos. 
One  of  the  happy,  less  irksome  ways  of  teaching 
geography  follows  the  picture-puzzle  method. 
Of  course  the  whole  thing,  whether  used  for 
diversion  or  instruction,  has  some  real  limita- 
tions. The  only  thing  you  can  do  is  to  restore 
the  pieces  to  their  original  place  in  the  map  or 
the  picture.  If  the  process  comes  out  at  all,  it 
comes  out  the  same  way  every  time.  Always  "as 
it  Avas  in  the  beginning"  so  it  "is  now"  and  so 
it  "ever  shall  be,  world  without  end."  The  pro- 
cess is  not  at  all  creative.  It  leaves  no  place  for 
freedom,  originality,  or  initiative.  Indiana  al- 
ways goes  into  the  same  place,  between  Ohio  and 
Illinois,  and  there  is  no  place  for  Texas  and  New 
York  except  their  own  place. 

Some  years  ago  the  world  blew  up,  and  the 
15 


16  THIS  MIND 

pieces  came  down  in  a  heap ;  pieces  of  every  size, 
shape,  and  color;  ragged,  torn  pieces;  soiled, 
marred  pieces,  with  lots  of  pieces  utterly  miss- 
ing. And  all  over  our  world  men  are  trying  to 
put  them  together,  either  as  they  were  or  in  some 
new  adjustment.  Putting  a  picture-puzzle  to- 
gether is  a  game  or  a  recreation,  remaking  a 
sawed-up  map  an  academic  activity.  But  the 
w^orld  business  is  wholly  serious.  Worlds  have 
no  business  blowing  up  like  this.  You  can  spill 
a  puzzle  or  a  map  and  cheerfully  go  to  work  to 
put  it  together  again;  but  if  the  world  is  going 
to  behave  like  this  with  any  frequency,  life  can 
never  be  cheerful  again,  no  matter  how  brave  it 
may  be. 

This  process  of  reconstruction  is  at  present 
all  absorbing.  If  the  word  had  not  existed,  we 
must  have  invented  it  as  we  did  others.  For 
all  our  principal  people,  either  in  groups  or  in- 
dividually, promptly  set  out  on  the  business  of 
reconstruction,  some  of  them  vocally,  some  of 
them  really.  And  all  the  old  groups  appeared 
again.  Thoroughgoing  conservatives  tried  to  put 
the  pieces  together  as  they  had  been  before,  to 
make  as  little  change  as  possible.  It  has  not  been 
a  very  encouraging  period  for  a  crass  conserva- 
tive. Some  frankly  do  not  even  care  to  try  to  re- 
place the  pieces  in  their  original  places  or  rela- 
tions.  They  prefer  a  brand-new  combination  with 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       17 

a  lot  of  the  old  stuff  left  out  altogether,  either  to 
be  burned  or  junked.  Some  of  these  are  just 
plain  radicals  rejoicing  in  the  opportunity  for 
overthrow  and  destruction.  Some  are  true  be- 
lievers soberly  looking  for  a  new  Avorld.  They 
see  the  rough  and  ragged  edges  in  some  of  the 
old  relations,  the  rotten,  sham  materials  in  some 
of  the  old  fabrics,  but  they  are  not  downhearted. 
They  know  that  the  process  will  take  time,  that 
it  must  be  as  thorough  as  the  new  birth,  for  men 
and  nations,  that  it  will  test  men  even  more 
severely  than  did  the  swift  and  stormy  years  of 
the  war,  and  yet  they  bear  into  it  with  ^'hearts 
courageous."  They  lack  wisdom,  but  they  re- 
joice in  the  unrebuking  promise  to  those  who 
ask  for  wisdom  they  mean  to  use. 

And  the  lines  of  the  rebuilders  run  into  one 
another.  This  is  no  task  for  one  man  or  one 
group.  Life's  interests  and  departments  inter- 
penetrate. The  economic  policies  of  the  world 
do  bear  upon  its  religious  and  intellectual  life. 
The  forms  of  government  are  related  to  the  faith, 
the  education,  the  economic  condition,  and  the 
character  of  the  people.  We  cannot  rebuild  the 
modern  Nehemiah's  wall  if  we  disregard  any  gate 
of  it  or  regard  any  part  of  it  as  unimportant. 

These  lines  also  run  into  other  realms  and 
regions  of  life.  I  suppose  God's  relation  to  the 
world  is  at  least  a  threefold   relation.     It  is 


18  THIS  MIND 

creative  or  constructive,  it  is  educational  or 
evolutionary,  and  it  is  reconstructive  or  redemp- 
tive. Only  the  half  gods  concern  themselves  with 
part  of  a  god's  occupation.  We  are  probably  in 
the  third  act  of  the  divine  drama.  In  the  first 
act  the  human  soul  appears  as  the  climax  of  crea- 
tion. And  it  was  so  good  that  the  morning  stars 
sang  over  it.  In  the  second  act  Jesus  appeared 
as  the  climax  of  revelation.  And  that  was  so 
good  that  the  angels  sang  their  song  of  glory. 
In  the  third  act  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  the  new 
heaven,  the  new  earth,  a  redeemed  humanity,  a 
redeemed  world  will  appear.  And  that  will  be 
so  good  that  the  host  that  no  man  can  number 
will  break  out  in  the  new  song  never  yet  heard. 
(See  Cairns'  Reasonableness  of  the  Christian 
Faith.) 

In  this  third  act  we  are  now.  We  are  in  it 
with  the  Master  of  all  life  and  destiny.  In  a 
very  peculiar  sense  the  youth  of  to-day,  and 
particularly  the  college  youth  of  to-day,  are  in 
it  with  Him.  For  the  issue  of  all  this  world 
movement,  this  quest  of  man  and  God  for  a  new 
world,  will  humanly  depend  upon  the  men  and 
women  who  will  make,  shape  and  determine 
the  next  quarter  of  a  century.  They  are  the 
makers  of  to-morrow. 

This  is  a  long,  perhaps  a  blind,  introduction 
to  what  I  mean  to  try  to  say.     Maybe  the  dis- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       19 

cussion  will  not  equal  the  theme.  I  do  not  flatter 
myself  with  pride  or  deceive  myself  with  false 
hope.  Really  I  shall  be  content  to  stand  here  by 
the  fountain  gate  and  make  so  loud  an  outcry 
that  the  builders  of  the  wall  will  put  this  gate  in 
order  and  in  place. 

Now  no  one  of  us  chooses  the  time  of  his  com- 
ing into  the  world.  We  are  born  and  live  our 
lives  in  the  world  as  it  is  when  we  live.  We  may 
fret  and  complain  because  we  were  not  allowed 
to  live  at  some  other  period,  under  other  condi- 
tions, but  fretting  and  complaining  are  not  very 
noble  attitudes.  We  can  go  through  a  perioci 
like  our  own,  saying  with  Hamlet : 

'The  world  is  out  of  joint, 
Oh  cursed  spite,  that  ever  I  was  born 
To  set  it  right.'' 

But  Hamlet  is  not  the  most  useful  character  in 
literature  or  history.  I  do  not  commend  his 
attitude  to  you.  A  man  carrying  a  personal 
grievance  like  that  cannot  carry  much  else.  His- 
tory is  full  of  finer  figures.  It  would  be  inter- 
esting to  study  a  lot  of  them.  Indeed,  I  see  no 
way  of  properly  getting  into  our  age  unless  w^e 
know  how  the  best  men  and  women  of  other  ages 
got  into  theirs.  For  in  a  very  real  sense  every  one 
of  us  is  born  in  the  fullness  of  time.  Some  ful- 
fill the  purpose  for  which  they  are  born  when  and 


;20  THIS  MIND 

where  they  are,  and  these  become  world  bene- 
factors. Others  fail,  some  for  one  reason,  some 
for  another,  and  these  become  the  world's  failures 
or  tragedies.  The  teacher  of  history  has  about 
the  best  chance  there  is  to  reveal  to  youth  the 
meaning  and  value  of  personality.  He  can  show 
to  men  and  women  having  only  one  life  each  the 
importance  of  placing  that  life  according  to  right 
principles,  in  the  right  spirit,  and  in  the  right 
place.  He  can  show  the  real  meaning  of  life  deci- 
sions, which  are  not  primarily  decisions  to  be 
preachers,  or  teachers,  or  doctors  or  lawyers. 
Which  of  these  one  will  be  is  really  the  secondary 
question  of  life,  the  question  one  is  not  prepared 
to  answer  until  the  earlier,  more  fundamental 
one  has  been  settled.  The  teacher  of  history, 
who  at  his  best  is  really  the  teacher  of  life,  can 
show  the  necessity  of  reaching  these  primary 
decisions  in  the  light  of  the  best  examples.  Does 
he  know  anyone  who  has  really  shown  what  a 
man  may  be,  what  a  man  may  try,  what  a  man 
may  do?  If  so,  he  has  in  his  hand  a  wisdom,  a 
truth  valuable  beyond  rubies  or  any  other 
precious  thing,  for  examples  are  ever  better  than 
rules  in  this  holy  game  of  life.  The  rules,  the 
principles  at  last  come  from  the  persons  who 
have  done  it  or  who  have  failed.  If  any  man  has 
truly  served  his  generation,  he  is  the  real  gleam. 
After  him,  follow  him.    More  than  once  in  these 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       21 

purely  personal  studies  one  sentence  written  by 
one  man  of  another  is  likely  to  break  out :  ^^In 
bim  was  life,  and  the  life  was  the  light  of  men." 

And  that  sentence  introduces  us  to  another 
fundamental  principle,  the  principle  that  we 
must  follow  the  best  person  there  is,  that  there 
is  no  first-class  product  based  on  a  second-class 
model.  I  think  I  must  bear  down  on  this  in  view 
of  what  I  mean  to  try  to  say  before  we  are 
through.  For  many  years  it  has  been  my  high 
privilege  to  speak  to  America's  youth.  Not  so 
many  years  remain  as  have  gone.  Before  the 
end  of  the  years  is  reached  I  must  as  often  and 
as  clearly  as  possible  bear  and  reaffirm  my  testi- 
mony. This  is  it :  If  I  knew  one  who  faced  his 
age  and  all  ages  in  better  spirit,  greater  wisdom, 
or  truer  devotion  than  Jesus  showed,  I  would 
commend  and  follow  him.  If  I  knew  any  better 
plan  for  a  personal  life  than  Jesus'  plan,  I  would 
commend  and  adopt  it.  If  I  knew  any  better 
basis  for  life  decisions  than  Jesus'  basis  for  his 
own  life  decision,  I  would  commend  it  and  rest 
my  life  on  it.  If  I  knew  a  better  outcome  in  any 
life  than  the  outcome  seen  in  Jesus'  life,  I  would 
try  to  go  the  way  that  reached  it. 

I  have  passed  through  many  forms  of  personal 
question  in  my  life.  Some  of  them  have  ceased 
to  be  important,  some  of  them  remain  un- 
answered.   But  I  quote  Robert  'Browning's  words 


22  THIS  MIND 

to-day, and  answer  them  affirmatively  without  a 
quiver  or  a  hesitation : 

"What  think  ye  of  Christ,  friend,  when  all's  done  and 
said? 
Like  you  this  Christianity  or  not? 
It  may  be  false,  but  would  you  have  it  true? 
Has  it  your  vote  to  be  so  if  it  can  ?" 

Jesus  Christ  has  my  vote,  and  he  has  it  whether 
he  gets  any  other  votes  or  not.  Maybe  no  one 
else  will  vote  for  him,  but  I  will  not  condition  my 
vote  on  the  amount  of  popular  support  he  gets. 
I  w^ill  not  say  I  will  be  one  of  ten.  I  vote  for 
him,  not  because  others  are  going  to  do  it,  but 
solely  because  he  deserves  an  unscratched  ballot 
from  me.  He  is  the  best  that  has  appeared,  the 
best  that  does  appear.  He  gets  me.  I  go  along 
with  him.  After  all  the  years  you  simply  cannot 
think  of  anyone  else.  No  one  else  is  in  his  class. 
And  there  must  be  no  half-heartedness  or  divi- 
sion in  our  loyalty  to  him.  Dragging  along  after 
a  half  god  is  a  desperately  wearisome  business. 
Partial  allegiance  to  a  perfect  god  is  almost  the 
last  thing  in  futility  and  dreariness.  Nothing 
but  thoroughness  can  save  us  here.  Half  carry- 
ing, half  dragging  the  yoke  of  fellowship  will 
chafe  and  gall.  Casual,  shallow,  trivial,  reserved 
obedience  will  not  answer.  You  can  go  the  whole 
length  with  him  and  live,  live  royally,  live  exult- 
ingiy  and  victoriously,  but  if  you  only  partially 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       23 

enthrone  Mm,  or  if  you  crown  him  with  mental 
reservations,  you  will  not  get  far. 

I  am  not  trying  to  make  this  appear  easy.  One 
of  the  saddest  things  in  our  time  is  the  easy, 
jaunty  air  of  these  shallow  loyalties  and  obedi- 
ences. Anything  that  goes  to  the  depths  is  toler- 
ably certain  to  hurt.  The  ease  and  flippancy  of 
halfway  reliance  upon  and  halfway  loyalty  to 
the  half  gods  have  got  us  into  our  present  trouble. 
There  is  only  one  way  out.  Life  decisions  made 
lightly,  as  one  should  choose  a  cravat  or  order  a 
meal,  may  be  easily  made.  You  can  get  great 
numbers  of  decisions  at  meetings  of  a  certain 
sort  and  under  a  certain  kind  of  appeal.  But  you 
do  not  get  the  men  and  women  who  will  finally 
count  for  Christ  unless  these  life  decisions  are 
made  face  to  face  with  Christ  and  the  makers 
know  what  it  cost  for  him  to  make  his  own  life 
decisions. 

Many  forms  of  question  have  arisen  and  passed 
in  my  lifetime.  Some  of  them  disturbed  the 
churches  very  much.  I  think  my  chief  concern 
to-day  is  that  the  makers  of  to-morrow  shall  take 
Jesus  Christ  seriously  as  an  authority  and  ex- 
ample, and  that  they  shall  firmly  believe  that  the 
principles  of  Jesus  can  be  applied,  must  be 
applied  to  themselves  and  other  men  and  women. 
Can  his  principles  for  his  own  life  be  used  by 
John  Smith,  freshman  or  senior?     They  could 


24  THIS  MIND 

be  used  by  Jesus.  No  others  seem  possible  as 
you  look  at  him.  You  cannot  get  a  life  like  his 
on  any  other  basis.  Maybe  the  glory  that  will 
come  to  your  generation  will  be  the  genuine 
discovery  by  thousands  of  college  men  and 
women  that  the  principles  of  that  other  life  are 
the  only  principles  for  their  lives.  Pretty  much 
everything  else  has  been  tried  first  and  last.  Let 
us  in  all  heartiness  try  this. 

Of  course  this  is  not  a  gay,  jaunty  business. 
It  is  not  putting  together  a  picture-puzzle  for 
an  hour's  diversion.  It  is,  at  last,  putting  to- 
gether in  proper  place  and  proper  relation  the 
forces  of  eternal  life.  Seeing  the  best  person  do 
it  with  his  own  life  is  better  than  being  in  at 
the  creation  of  a  planet  or  a  dozen  planets. 
Really  I  would  rather  understand  the  working 
of  Jesus'  mind,  know  his  attitude,  his  disposi- 
tion concerning  his  own  life  in  the  world  than 
anything  else  in  the  realm  of  knowledge.  ( I  am 
using  the  familiar  translation,  being  familiar,  of 
course,  with  Weymouth's :  "Let  the  same  disposi- 
tion be  in  you" — and  Moffat's  "Treat  one  another 
with  the  same  spirit  as  you  experience  in  Christ 
Jesus" — and  the  Twentieth  Century  New  Testa- 
ment: "Let  the  Spirit  of  Christ  Jesus  be  yours.") 

And  now  let  us  look  naturally  and  steadily  at 
some  of  those  essential  principles  upon  which 
Jesus  proceeded  in  his  life  decisions.     Let  us 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       25 

look  at  him  as  we  would  at  John  Wesley  or 
Phillips  Brooks  or  Abraham  Lincoln  if  we  were 
trying  to  find  out  how  they  decided  what  to  do 
with  their  lives.  Only  let  us  remember  that  in 
the  case  of  Jesus  a  perfect  result  was  reached. 
We  must,  therefore,  be  extra  careful  to  find  the 
way  by  which  he  reached  it.  This  is  a  real  study 
in  biography,  undertaken  by  serious  people  who 
earnestly  want  to  know  how  to  make  a  life,  and 
who  go,  wisely,  to  the  one  person  who  made  the 
outstanding  success  of  history  in  that  important 
matter.  This  is  not  a  study  as  to  why  one  should 
be  a  preacher,  or  a  lawyer,  or  a  missionary,  or 
a  teacher,  or  an  editor,  but  a  study  of  some  of 
the  principles  upon  which  the  Supreme  Person 
of  time  based  his  life.  Making  a  life  on  those 
principles  is  surely  the  primary,  fundamental 
thing.  The  other  questions  will  answer  them- 
selves if  we  find  the  answer  to  this  one. 

First:  I  think  the  ultimate  basis  upon  which 
his  life  decision  was  made  and  on  which  it  was 
worked  out  in  his  life  was  his  sense  of  God.  I 
wish  I  could  say  this  as  it  really  ought  to  be 
said.  I  never  coveted  more  earnestly  the  high- 
est gifts  of  religious  and  personal  speech.  I  do 
not  want  to  speak  theologically,  or  conventional- 
ly, or  to  say  anything  that  may  even  sound  like 
an  outworn  shibboleth.  If  any  half  dozen  intelli- 
gent persons  were  to  be  asked  to  name  the  out- 


26  THIS  MIND 

standing  fact  in  the  consciousness  of  Jesus  con- 
cerning- his  life  nearly  a  half  dozen  different 
answers  would  be  received.  One  would  promptly 
answer  that  the  deepest  thing  in  his  life  was  his 
idea  and  spirit  of  service  and  sacrifice;  another 
that  it  was  his  power  over  human  and  natural 
forces  as  seen  in  the  wonders  he  performed; 
another  that  it  was  his  wisdom  as  seen  in  his  un- 
paralleled teaching;  another  that  it  was  the 
Kingdom  of  which  he  was  ever  speaking,  for 
which  he  w^as  ever  striving.  And  all  these 
answers  would  be  tolerably  true.  These  things 
and  many  others  are  so  real,  so  fundamental  in 
his  life  that  his  life  does  really  seem  in  large 
measure  to  rest  on  them.  Still,  they  do  not  seem 
to  go  quite  to  the  rock  bottom.  The  real  basis 
seems  to  be  that  he  was,  in  Browning's  words, 
"very  sure  of  God."  One  must  use  a  familiar 
word  and  at  once  many  i)ersons  knowing  that 
word  will  think  it  is  used  in  the  sense  in  which 
they  commonly  use  it.  We  must  try,  therefore, 
even  with  the  familiar  term  to  convey  a  deeper, 
more  personal,  perhaps  unfamiliar  meaning.  Us- 
ing negatives  is  not  a  very  fruitful  process  in 
interpretation,  but  I  will  use  one  or  two  never- 
theless. Saying  that  God  was  the  basis  of  his 
life  is  not  the  same  as  saying  that  Jesus  firmly 
believed  in  God,  though  of  course  he  did.  It  is 
not  the  same  as  saying  that  he  genuinely  knew 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       27 

God,  though  of  course  he  did.  It  is  not  the  same 
as  saying  that  he  had  either  a  creed  or  experience 
of  which  God  was  the  center  and  basis,  though 
he  did  have  both.  One  may  never  rid  himself 
of  presuppositions  in  such  matters  as  this,  but 
one  must  never  allow  the  presuppositions  he 
brings  to  such  a  study  to  cloud  or  prevent  an 
original,  fresh,  fundamental  vision  if  it  can  be 
had.  Maybe  our  next  great  discovery  in  personal 
religion,  and,  if  so,  for  personal  life,  will  be  the 
discovery  of  the  real,  personal  meaning  of  God 
in  the  life  of  Jesus.  We  need  not  speak  as 
mystics  nor  with  spiritual  extravagance,  but  we 
surely  never  have  got  to  the  real  bottom  of  the 
meaning,  the  fact,  the  place  of  God  in  the  life  of 
Jesus.  His  consciousness  of  God  has  been  called 
"the  greatest  spiritual  fact  that  has  ever  emerged 
in  the  long  story  of  the  human  race"  (Robertson, 
Spiritual  Pilgrimage  of  Jesus,  p.  13 ) .  And  yet 
the  church  has  made  a  doctrine  of  God's  nature 
and  character,  a  definition  of  God  where  Jesus 
never  did  make  one.  And  the  church  has  too 
largely  missed  the  personal  meaning  of  God  in 
Jesus'  own  life ;  failed  to  emphasize  and  set  out 
for  other  young  men  the  relation  between  the 
life  decisions  of  Jesus,  the  lifework  of  Jesus,  and 
his  sense  of  God,  his  consciousness  of  God,  his 
constant  treatment  of  God  as  the  very  basis  of  it 
all. 


28  THIS  MIND 

This  determined  his  decisions,  his  activities, 
his  purposes,  his  spirit  and  everything  else  that 
went  to  make  him  what  we  see  him  to  be.  This 
gave  depth,  transparency  and  steadiness  to  his 
life.  This  furnished  a  foundation  for  other  prin- 
ciples of  decision  and  activity  as  we  shall  shortly 
see.  Thomas  Arnold  complained  of  the  Rugby 
boys  that  ^'God  was  not  in  all  their  thoughts,'^ 
meaning  that  God  was  not  in  their  thoughts  at 
all.  One  has  only  to  say  that  to  see  at  once  that 
Jesus  had  no  thoughts  at  all  about  his  life  that 
God  was  not  in. 

One  of  the  sermons  much  and  deservedly  much 
referred  to  a  generation  or  two  ago  was  Horace 
Bushnell's  famous  sermon  on  the  subject,  "Every 
Man's  Life  a  Plan  of  God."  It  gave  to  many 
hundreds  of  men  a  sober  sense  that  life  was 
sacred,  that  God  had  a  personal  interest  in  what 
it  should  be,  that  it  made  a  difference  to  God  him- 
self whether  a  man,  any  man,  accepted  God's 
plan  for  his  life  or  made  one  for  himself  leaving 
God  out  of  consideration  as  he  made  it.  Many  a 
man  with  no  purpose  of  doing  Avrong  makes  his 
own  plans  and  either  presents  them  to  God  for 
his  blessing  or  goes  through  life  leaving  God 
wholly  to  one  side.  But  even  Bushnell's  mighty 
topic  does  not  quite  say  what  needs  to  be  said. 
God  does  not  make  a  plan  for  a  life  like  Jesus 
Christ's  and  hand  it  to  him  to  adopt  and  work 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       29 

out.  God  is  not  a  life-plan  maker  like  that.  Nor 
is  God  the  divine  helper  of  persons  who  make 
their  own  plans.  He  is  the  abiding  personal 
basis  upon  which  true  men  and  women  make 
their  life  plans,  life  decisions  and  life  endeavors. 
One  most  careful  student  writes :  ^^It  is  surely 
fair  to  begin  where  Jesus  began :  and  Jesus  be- 
gan with  God"  (Hutton,  The  Proposal  of  Jesus, 
p.  64).  And  another  as  though  foreseeing  our 
need  for  such  a  word  says :  "The  object  of  Jesus 
was  to  induce  men  to  base  all  life  on  God" 
(Glover,  Jesus  of  History ^^  p.  113).  But  we  are 
always  failing  to  see  that  Jesus  had  a  faith  and 
a  practice  of  his  own.  His  object  was  to  induce 
men  to  base  all  life  on  God,  and  his  method  was 
to  base  all  his  own  life  on  that  supreme  person. 
His  teachings  for  other  men  lie  firmly  in  his 
beliefs  and  principles  for  himself.  And  I  know 
no  way  for  you  to  start  right  in  making  your  life 
decisions  except  the  way  of  Jesus;  no  way  to 
reach  a  right  decision  for  your  life  if  you  leave 
God  out  of  it  or  give  him  a  secondary  place  in 
it.  There  is  no  way  to  avoid  the  "fuss  and  fret," 
the  distraction,  shallowness,  and  selfishness  that 
mar  our  decisions  and  spoil  our  lives  except 
Jesus'  way.  We,  like  him,  must  rest  our  lives 
upon  God,  identify  our  lives  with  God,  make  his 
business  our  business,  his  house  our  house,  and 

^Association  Press,  New  York,  Publishers. 


30  THIS  MIND 

do  it  joyfully  even  as  Jesus  did.  He  evidently 
thought  it  the  best  thing  for  him  to  base  his  life 
upon  God.  The  outcome  fully  justifies  that  act. 
By  doing  it  he  tried  to  teach  and  induce  the  rest 
of  us  so  to  do  it.  This  is  the  way  the  best  life 
on  earth  was  reached  and  maintained.  Until  a 
better  life  has  been  reached  on  some  other  basis 
let  us  follow  this  one. 

Second:  Even  before  we  are  done  with  the 
discussion  of  this  basic  principle  of  Jesus'  life 
decision,  another  principle  emerges  both  from  it 
and  with  it.  The  New  Testament  is  a  relentless 
book.  Once  give  it  a  grip  on  you  and  it  carries 
you  irresistibly  to  all  the  implications  and  con- 
clusions involved.  Christianity  is  not  a  religion 
of  electives,  in  which  you  can  choose  the  things 
you  like  and  ignore  the  others.  Men  have  always 
been  trying  to  keep  or  get  right  relations  with 
God  as  though  that  were  the  essence  and  whole  of 
religion.  And  many  men  making  their  life  deci- 
sions have  piously  said:  "I  will  do  what  God 
wants  me  to  do/'  as  though  that  true  and  pious 
principle  covered  the  whole  case.  Jesus  never 
got  into  that  personal  and  religious  fog.  He 
did  not  try  to  solve  the  personal  or  the  religious 
problem  by  any  false  methods.  He  boldly,  con- 
sistently, and  thoroughly  went  the  whole  length 
to  which  his  supreme  avowals  carried  him.  He 
never  hedged  on  his  faith  in  God,  for  example, 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       31 

because  that  faith  would  surely  lead  him  to  a 
faith  in  men  and  a  service  for  men,  absolutely 
new  in  the  world. 

So  the  principle  of  life  decision  based  upon 
the  fact  of  God's  place  in  his  life  is  matched  by 
the  principle  of  man's  deepest  need  for  his  life. 
He  had  God ;  men  needed  God.  His  life  was  full 
of  God ;  men  were  out  of  joint  with  Him.  Jesus 
sees  their  need  and  responds  to  it,  without  hesita- 
tion, because  this  is  the  inexorable  logic  of  his 
own  sense  and  vision  of  God.  What  saved  his  life 
from  destruction  must  be  taken  by  him  to  men 
already  destroyed  and  being  destroyed  for  lack 
of  it.  No  matter  where  this  carries  him,  he  must 
go  where  it  leads.  He  cannot  take  up  half  the 
burden  of  human  need  and  retain  to  the  full  the 
consciousness  of  God  in  his  own  life.  He  cannot 
keep  on  using  the  words  "fellowship,"  "commun- 
ion" and  "oneness"  unless  he  perfectly  identifies 
himself,  in  a  perfect  and  loving  service,  with  all 
that  wretched  humanity  that  is  catalogued  by  all 
the  disagreeable  terms  like  "leper,"  "prodigal," 
"harlot,"  "thief,"  and  "sinner."  It  was  not  a 
vague,  rhetorical  enthusiasm  for  an  idealized 
humanity  that  moved  him.  It  w^as  not  the  fire  of 
a  reformer  that  burned  in  him.  He  was  not  set 
on  writing  a  thesis  on  the  social  conditions  of 
the  Jews  or  any  other  group.  He  never  made  a 
chart  or  issued  a  questionnaire.     He  was  not  a 


32  THIS  MIND 

^'parlor"  social  worker.  He  was  as  conscious  of 
men  as  of  God.  His  contacts  with  people,  indi- 
vidual people,  were  as  direct  and  immediate  as 
his  contacts  with  God.  He  could  not  live  with- 
out God.  By  the  same  token  he  could  not  live 
without  Peter  and  other  men.  Our  language 
breaks  down  in  the  attempt  to  put  this  relation  of 
himself  id  men's  deepest  needs,  this  absolute 
identification  of  himself  with  men  on  the  basis 
of  their  need.  It  was  not  the  same  as  saying,  "I 
am  one  of  you,  one  with  you,  in  your  character, 
in  your  spiritual  infirmity,  your  moral  sickness.-^ 
Any  one  might  have  said  that  and  no  cure  or 
relief  have  followed.  He  was  for  men,  for  men 
w^ho  were  not  what  they  ought  to  be,  for  them 
that  they  might  become  what  they  ought  to  be. 
What  was  the  good  of  such  relation  to  God  as 
he  sustained  if  men  were  to  go  on  in  prison,  in 
ignorance,  in  hunger,  in  moral  wreck,  in  spiritual 
helplessness,  just  as  before?  This  is  man's  actual 
state  but  not  his  right  state.  And  no  principle 
of  life  decision  that  does  not  propose  to  cure, 
change,  remove  all  that,  is  like  Jesus'  principle. 
The  world  of  men  did  not  know  it,  does  not 
know  it  to-day,  but  Jesus  proposed  as  a  lifework 
to  touch  every  man  at  the  point  of  his  deepest 
needs.  His  world,  like  ours,  was  ready  to  deal 
with  secondary  needs,  like  restoring  the  King- 
dom, like  giving  people  physical  health,  physical 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       33 

comfort,  and  material  welfare.  You  will  be 
tempted  to  make  your  life  decisions  on  some  form 
of  'this  basis.  It  looks  more  immediate  and 
direct  than  the  other.  But  in  dealing  with  men 
he  went  clear  to  the  bottom  of  the  eternal  strug- 
gle between  the  partial  and  the  complete,  between 
the  secondary  and  the  primary,  between  the 
superficial  and  the  thorough  treatment  of  our 
human  need.  The  struggle  is  still  on,  on  in  all 
lands,  all  religions  and  all  classes.  I  want 
the  youth  of  my  day,  the  youth  of  Christ's  church 
to  stand  with  him  in  his  attitude  to  men  and  his 
proposed  service  to  men.  There  is  no  other  right 
place  to  stand. 

The  human  world  is  wrong  in  the  soul,  the 
heart,  the  character  of  it.  It  is  not  simply  un- 
developed or  misguided  or  belated.  It  dresses  well 
and  it  dresses  poorly,  its  manners  are  refined  and 
its  manners  are  vulgar,  but  neither  a  change  of 
clothes  or  manners  will  reach  the  real  need.  I 
am  purposely  making  this  as  hard  and  as  high 
as  I  can.  That  is  the  way  Jesus  did.  He  did  not 
reach  his  life  decision  for  his  life  on  the  basis 
of  a  partial  faith  in  God  or  a  minor  operation 
on  humanity.  It  is  enough  to  set  all  the  college 
yells  in  Christendom  going  at  their  best  for  the 
college  youth  of  Christendom  to  see  a  person  like 
Jesus  who  unhesitatingly  gave  himself  to  the 
making  over  of  a  humanity  that  is  morally  wrong, 


34  THIS  MIND 

morally  hopeless  without  him  and  morally  help- 
less apart  from  him.  I  have  simply  got  to  go 
with  a  person  who  has  a  spirit  like  that.  If  any- 
thing like  that  is  going  on  in  the  world,  under 
such  a  leader,  I  simply  must  be  in  it  with  him. 

Third:  We  have  spoken  of  two  fundamental 
realities  that  must  be  reckoned  with  by  any  one 
making  his  own  life  decision,  deciding  what  mind 
shall  be  in  him.  These  realities  are  God  the 
Author,  the  Father,  the  Redeemer  of  life;  and 
humanity  the  expression,  the  embodiment,  the 
climax  and  interest  of  life  itself.  There  is  a 
third  reality  which  must  belong  to  each  of  the 
others,  though  it  may  stand  somehow  between 
them.  That  third  reality  is  a  human  personality, 
a  man,  a  woman.  Through  this  third  reality  God 
reaches  the  second  with  help  and  light  and  power. 
Through  it  the  second  is  guided  on  the  way  to 
God,  on  the  way  of  life  with  God.  It  is  this 
third  reality,  this  man,  this  woman  that  makes 
life  decisions,  whose  life  decisions  are  so  impor- 
tant. And  by  a  perfectly  natural  law  the  person 
reaching  the  decision  must  have  absolute  regard 
for  his  own  highest  self  in  the  doing  of  it.  This 
pillar  must  not  sag  if  the  structure  is  to  be  per- 
fect. Always  a  person,  like  Jesus,  must  make  his 
decisions  at  the  highest  level  of  what  he  is,  and 
in  the  light  of  what  he  may  become  as  he  works 
it  all  out  with  God  in  and  for  humanitv.    There 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       35 

is  something  to  be  saved  besides  humanity.  The 
saviours  of  humanity  must  themselves  be  saved 
and  not  lost  in  their  task. 

Now,  I  know  the  talk  that  is  current  on  this 
theme.  We  easily  laugh  at  Emerson's  picture 
of  the  wagon  and  the  star.  We  talk  wisely  about 
keeping  our  feet  on  the  ground  and  our  wagon 
on  the  well-paved  road.  Ordinary  good  sense  is 
much  praised  by  us  in  these  days  of  mistaken 
democracy,  the  democracy  of  leveling  down,  the 
democracy  of  the  common  average.  A  very 
prevalent  skepticism  is  that  which  doubts  and 
distrusts  our  best  judgment,  our  highest  ideals. 
We  call  some  men  visionaries  as  though  they  who 
have  no  vision  were  superior  beings.  A  college 
student,  only  one,  I  am  glad  to  say,  out  of  thou- 
sands, once  said  to  me,  ''No  one  reaches  his  deci- 
sions on  this  level."  The  answer  is  that  Jesus 
did.  The  world  would  have  perished  if  he  or 
some  one  had  not.  The  world  is  blessed  and 
enriched  with  a  new  chance  whenever  one  does. 

You  can  open  the  story  at  any  one  of  several 
places  which  will  readily  occur  to  you,  but  every 
time  you  see  him  you  see  that  he  is  holding  fast 
to  the  highest,  is  saying  that  what  is  best  must 
be  chosen,  that  he  must  not  let  down  either  in 
making  his  choice  or  in  fulfilling  it.  The  great 
names  of  Jewish  history  were  familiar  to  him — 
Abraham,  Moses,  Elijah,  Isaiah,  and  the  rest. 


36  THIS  MIND 

He  must  not  drop  below  them.  He  must  go  far 
beyond  them.  That  is  what  any  youth  owes  to 
the  noblest  figures  in  his  own  nation's  history  or 
in  the  world's  history.  A  nation  is  already  far 
gone  toward  death  when  its  youth  has  only  a 
historic  interest  in  the  Washingtons,  the  Lin- 
colns,  and  the  Roosevelts  whose  lives  it  does  not 
expect  to  fulfill  and  surpass. 

Jesus  knew  the  history  of  that  race  from  which 
he  had  sprung,  that  forward-looking  people  with 
the  expectation  of  its  seers  and  prophets  ever 
reaching  toward  golden  days.  He  knew  the  wist- 
ful spirit  in  which  they  had  died  without  seeing 
what  they  looked  for.  And  his  whole  bearing 
is  as  of  one  who  said :  "By  God's  grace  it  shall  be 
seen.  There  will  be  one  person  who  will  keep  the 
faith,  who  will  follow  the  gleam.''  He  knew  the 
sustaining,  inspiring  ideals  of  the  old  men  who 
dreamed  dreams  and  the  young  men  who  saw 
visions ;  he  knew  the  long,  sad  way  of  redeeming 
a  race,  a  race  blind  and  dumb  and  willful.  He 
had  the  awful  knowledge  of  mankind  that  makes 
other  men  prudent  and  sensible,  that  destroys 
what  they  call  their  illusions  as  to  the  outcome 
for  mankind,  x^nd  with  a  high  heart  he  bore  into 
it,  "never  doubting  clouds  would  break."  When 
a  cross  threw  its  dreadful  shadow  across  the  path 
in  front  of  him  he  cried  out  with  joy  that  it  was 
worth  a  cross.    When  shame  drew  near  to  depress 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       37 

and  blacken  him,  he  despised  it  and  trampled  on 
it,  seeing  that  he  was  on  his  way  to  bring  many 
sons  to  glory. 

When,  therefore,  anyone  says  that  it  cannot 
be  done  like  this,  the  answer  is  that  Jesus  did 
it  like  this.  If  anyone  says  that  it  is  not  being 
done  like  that  this  year,  that  young  men  and 
women  are  not  using  that  pattern  this  year,  the 
answer  is  that  we  can  make  this  a  new  year  of 
the  Lord  by  adopting  this  pattern  again  and  mak- 
ing it  universal. 

Do  I  make  myself  clear?  Our  life  decisions 
must  be  made  when  we  are  at  our  best,  the  best 
we  are,  the  best  we  may  be;  when  we  are  doing 
the  straightest,  best,  clearest  thinking;  when  the 
highest  influences  are  running  at  full  tide  in  our 
lives;  when  there  is  the  least  of  selfishness  and 
fear  and  doubt  in  us,  and  the  most  of  love, 
courage,  and  faith.  All  our  ambitions,  all  our 
decisions  must  come  from  life's  highest  levels,  or 
life  itself  drops  to  the  dust.  There  is  no  blunder 
that  exceeds  the  blunder  of  reaching  decisions 
on  a  low  level.  There  is  no  unbelief  more  deadly 
than  unbelief  in  and  distrust  of  life's  best  hours, 
best  examples,  best  visions.  Trust  the  highest 
outside  of  yourself,  trust  the  noblest  within  your- 
self. Thus,  and  thus  only,  can  the  three  funda- 
mental realities  be  kept  alive  in  your  life — God, 
humanity,  and  your  own  soul. 


38  THIS  MIND 

I  do  not  pretend  that  all  this  can  be  seen  or 
felt  in  its  fullness  at  life's  beginning.  The  full 
and  complete  appreciation  of  life's  deepest  expe- 
riences requires  the  ripening  influence  of  years 
and  use.  Forty  years  ago  I  think  I  could  have 
told  another  person  of  my  own  age  what  my 
call  to  the  ministry  meant.  I  could  use  the  words 
to  such  a  person  to-day.  But  the  call  itself  is 
not  what  it  was.  It  was  fine  and  inspiring  then, 
when  life  and  the  world  were  young.  The  light 
of  a  dawning  day  was  on  it,  like  the  radiance  of 
a  perfect  love  in  its  beginning.  For  some  men,  in 
some  men,  the  high  call  to  high  service  dwindles 
and  shrivels  as  the  sun  rises  on  it.  Life  offers 
few  things  sadder  than  such  a  sight.  For  a  man 
to  live  on  in  a  calling  from  which  the  glory  has 
gone  or  a  relation  from  which  the  love  has  gone 
is  just  plain  perdition.  But  to  go  forward  in 
a  calling  or  a  relation  which  shines  more  and 
more  is  to  hear  the  trumpets  of  victory  above 
life's  din  and  drudgery.  To  see  your  life  expand- 
ing and  enlarging  as  it  advances  in  years  is  to 
walk  on  the  eternal  heights  with  the  great  and 
good,  is  really  to  know  the  life  that  is  life  indeed. 

And  I  do  not  know,  nor  care  greatly,  into  what 
particular  form  of  life  these  principles,  faith- 
fully applied,  will  lead  you.  The  principles  are 
the  thing.  A  call  is  not  limited  to  one  form  of 
service.    The  call  is  to  life  on  this  basis.    If  vou 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— I       39 

are  not  called  on  these  principles  and  in  this 
spirit  to  the  thing  you  propose  or  desire  to  do, 
keep  out  of  that  thing.  When  the  people  at  one 
time  found  that  Jesus  and  his  disciples  were  not 
at  a  certain  place  the  people  went  right  away 
from  that  place.  The  people  were  wise.  A  life 
decision  made,  as  Jesus'  decision  was  made,  with 
God  as  its  basis,  with  truest  service  to  humanity 
as  its  expression  through  life  long  or  short,  with 
one's  own  personality  always  at  its  best,  may 
lead  into  one  calling  or  another,  but  it  can  never 
lead  3^ou  astray.  This  is  the  way  Jesus  decided. 
His  life  is  based  upon  these  principles.  His  life 
is  the  answer  to  their  worth  and  wisdom,  his  life 
the  proof  that  they  can  be  worked  even  in  this 
perplexed  world.  No  one  else  has  done  it  better, 
no  one  else  has  done  it  so  well.  He  waits  for 
a  generation  or  score  of  men  and  women  to  stand 
up  with  him  on  these  principles.  What  think 
you?  Has  he  your  vote?  Will  you  stand  on  this 
level  with  him  or  on  some  other  without  him? 
He  has  my  vote.  I  will  go  with  him  wherever 
he  goes. 


II 


THIS  MIND  TOWARD  LIFE'S 
DECISIONS— II 

When  I  read  the  list  of  topics  for  this  short 
course  of  studies  one  day  to  a  discerning  friend 
he  asked  at  once  if  there  should  not  be  one  study 
on  ^'This  Mind  Toward  Life's  Spirit."  The  sug- 
gestion was  arresting  and  pertinent,  but  after 
carefully  weighing  it  the  conclusion  was  reached 
that  life's  spirit  is  not  a  thing  that  one  can  dis- 
cuss apart,  either  in  the  life  of  Jesus  or  the  life 
of  any  modern  man.  In  both,  the  spirit  flings 
itself  across,  throws  itself  into,  and  imposes  it- 
self upon  everything  else — the  decisions  them- 
selves, the  principles  on  which  they  are  based, 
the  objects,  the  methods,  the  relations,  the 
strength,  and  the  tests  of  life.  You  cannot  dis- 
cuss the  spirit  of  a  man  in  one  chapter  and  then 
study  the  rest  of  him.  The  spirit  of  him  runs 
clear  through  it  all.  It  makes  him  or  breaks 
him.  And  it  makes  or  breaks  him  clear  through 
the  whole  scale. 

Yet  no  one  of  these  studies  can  go  forward 
without  a  constant,  though  not  necessarily  fully 
expressed,  assumption  as  to  the  spirit  lying  back 

40 


TOWARD  LIFE'S   DECISIONS— II      41 

of  and  filling  the  whole  subject.  If  we  miss,  or 
if  we  do  not  care  for  the  spirit  of  Christ,  the 
spirit  in  which  he  did  everything  and  said  every- 
thing; if  we  neglect  or  disregard  the  spirit  in 
which  we  make  and  carry  forward  our  life  pur- 
poses, there  will  be  nothing  much  in  his  life  or 
ours  that  will  be  worth  while.  So  while  this 
does  not  appear  as  a  special  subject,  the  theme  of 
one  lecture  by  itself,  it  ought  to  and  I  trust  will 
penetrate  and  warm  them  all. 

A  few  years  ago  the  author  of  a  widely  read 
book  used  this  sentence :  "One  of  the  weaknesses 
of  the  church  to-day  is — put  bluntly — that  Chris- 
tians are  not  making  enough  of  Jesus  Christ" 
( Glover,  The  Jesus  of  History,  p.  4 ) .  That  sen- 
tence meets  the  prompt  and  emphatic  approval 
of  two  groups  that  do  not  approve  one  another 
at  all.  The  highly  conservative  group,  always 
sure  of  its  own  entire  orthodoxy  just  because  it 
is  conservative,  sanctions  the  statement  with 
many  affirmations  about  Christ  and  much  asser- 
tion of  its  own  doctrine  and  view  of  him.  The 
other  group,  weary  of  reactionary  conservatism, 
accepts  this  statement  as  fully  covering  its  own 
view,  that  it  is  Christ,  and  not  doctrines  about 
Christ,  that  must  be  emphasized.  And  before  we 
know  it,  the  doctrinal  debate  is  on,  the  phrases 
are  filling  the  air,  shibboleths  are  being  shouted, 
and  men  are  being  classified  and  tested  by  their 


42  THIS  MIND 

acceptance  or  rejection  of  certain  definitions  of 
Christ,  while  he  himself  is  compelled  to  stand  to 
one  side  or  look  elsewhere  for  disciples  and 
friends.  But  the  truth  is  that  the  phrases  "deity 
of  Jesus  Christ/'  the  "mastery  of  Jesus  Christ," 
the  "supremacy  of  Jesus  Christ,"  and  kindred 
words  are  the  poorest  shibboleths  in  the  world. 
They  cannot  be  made  into  doctrinal  shibboleths 
without  destroying  something  deep  and  precious 
in  them.  And  the  personal  thing  lying  in  and 
under  them  cannot  be  lost  out  of  any  human  life 
without  unutterable  loss.  We  must  really  "make 
enough  of  Jesus  Christ"  if  we  are  to  get  out  of 
the  present  ruck  and  up  to  the  heights.  And 
making  enough  of  him  requires  that  we  see  how 
he  made  so  nluch  of  himself,  and  go  into  his 
life  with  him  as  he  went  into  it  and  through  it 
himself. 

We  are  thinking  all  the  time  of  life  decisions, 
not  as  formal  acts  in  our  lives  or  in  his,  but  as 
the  essential  determination  of  what  one  is  to  do 
and  be.  Two  or  three  things  stand  out  in  Jesus' 
life  as  the  gateways  through  which  he  went  to 
the  fulfillment  of  his  life's  purpose,  the  accom- 
plishment of  the  objects  to  which  his  life  was 
dedicated.  He  went  into  it,  first,  for  example, 
through  the  gateway  of  perfect  personal  freedom. 
Many  young  people  have  expressed  the  opinion 
that  Jesus  never  was  up  against  a  problem  like 


TOWARD  LIFE'S   DECISIONS— II      43 

theirs,  that  his  course  was  marked  out  for  him, 
that  there  was  nothing  else  for  him  to  do,  noth- 
ing else  he  could  do.  Indeed,  I  think  there  is  a 
very  widespread  idea  that,  while  the  life  of  Jesus 
was  perfectly  admirable,  it  was  so  exceptional 
in  all  its  conditions  and  features  as  to  put  it 
entirely  off  the  level  of  other  personal  lives. 
Such  statements  as  BushnelFs,  that  "the  char- 
acter of  Jesus  forbids  his  possible  classification 
with  men,"  such  terms  as  "the  uniqueness  of 
Jesus'  character,"  lend  themselves  to  creating 
this  impression.  In  other  words,  we  have  some- 
times seemed  to  save  the  doctrine  of  the  deity  of 
Christ,  which  is  a  true  doctrine,  by  sacrificing 
the  reality  of  his  life  as  at  all  like  our  own  in 
essence  and  condition.  And,  of  course,  also  we 
do  infinite  violence  to  the  very  deepest  principle 
in  Jesus'  life  when  we  do  thus  exalt  a  doctrine 
about  him  to  a  place  above  his  own  personal 
meaning  for  men  or  above  himself.  The  doctrine 
or  phrase  must  never  conceal  or  obscure  the  per- 
son, or  put  him  farther  away. 

Why  are  we  so  afraid  of  the  idea  of  freedom  as 
applied  to  him  when  we  are  so  insistent  upon  it 
for  ourselves?  If  freedom  is  the  good  thing  we 
really  believe  it  to  be,  why  should  it  not  be 
granted  without  reserve  to  the  very  best  person 
there  is?  Why  sacrifice  his  meaning  for  life  by 
an  academic  devotion  to  his  meaning  for  the- 


44  THIS  MIND 

ology?  The  doctrine  of  the  deity  of  Christ  has 
its  chief  value  not  for  the  creeds,  but  for  the  men 
and  women  in  colleges  and  elsewhere,  the  men 
and  women  face  to  face  with  their  own  lives. 
And  they  cannot  rest  their  argument  and  demand 
for  freedom  on  an  abstraction.  The  final  argu- 
ment for  freedom  is  a  genuinely  free  person  mak- 
ing right  use  of  his  freedom.  The  final  assurance 
of  freedom  in  ordering  one's  life  is  that  Jesus 
was  free  in  ordering  his. 

Open  the  record  at  two  or  three  significant 
places  and  see  how  free  he  was  and  how  his  free- 
dom reaches  into  modern  life  wherever  high- 
minded  men  and  women  are  desiring  to  live  on 
high  levels.  Hear  him  say,  "I  do  always  what  is 
pleasing  to  Him."  Now,  no  one  can  imagine 
those  words  spoken  as  though  he  were  under 
even  a  divine  compulsion  that  destroyed  his  own 
freedom  in  the  matter.  Every  one  of  us  feels  that 
this  was  real  freedom  in  him  and  is  possible 
freedom  for  us.  We  perfectly  know  the  differ- 
ence between  the  parental  authority  that  kills 
liberty  and  the  parental  attitude  that  creates 
and  secures  it.  Or  take  the  very  familiar  words, 
"I  am  the  way,  the  truth,  the  life."  Suppose  we 
read  into  these  words  certain  additions :  ''I  am 
the  way,  but  you  cannot  walk  in  it.  I  am  the 
truth,  but  you  cannot  understand  it.  I  am  the 
life,  but  you  cannot  live  it."     That  violates  all 


TOWARD  LIFE'S   DECISIONS— II      45 

our  sense  of  the  spirit  of  Jesus,  and  reverses  our 

entire  idea  of  his  relation  to  us.     You  cannot 

really  imagine  him  saying  that.     And  if  he  had 

said  it,  you  would  simply  be  compelled  to  be  done 

with  him.     The  only  addition  that  those  w^ords 

will  fairly  bear  without  breaking  their  harmony 

with  his  whole  life  would  be  something  like  this : 

*'I  am  the  way;  walk  in  it  with  me.     I  am  the 

truth ;  be  free  in  it  as  I  am.    I  am  the  life ;  live  it 

with  me."    No  matter  how  poor  and  inadequate 

your  response  to  that  note,  you  know  it  is  the 

note  to  which  you  ought  to  respond.    Or  take  that 

other  word,  as  deep  and  significant  a  statement 

as  Jesus  ever  made  about  the  freedom  of  his 

own  life:  ^^I  have  the  power  to  lay  it  down.     I 

have  the  power  to  take  it  again.    No  man  taketh 

it  from  me.    I  lay  it  down  for  the  sheep."    You 

have  the  instant  feeling  that  here  speaks  a  free 

spirit,  here  speaks  a  man  as  a  man  ought  to  speak 

about  his  life.    A  person  who  can  truly  say  this 

is 

"The  Master  of  his  fate, 
The  Captain  of  his  soul." 

Quite  toward  the  end  he  spoke  again  in  words 
that  we  may  paraphrase  into  modern  speech: 
"Do  you  think  I  have  to  submit  to  this,  that  I  am 
carried  forward  by  superior  forces,  that  I  am  a 
slave  to  these  conditions?    I  could  call  for  help 


46  THIS  MIND 

and  get  a  dozen  legions  of  angels.  They  would 
rush  to  my  relief.  My  life  will  not  be  taken. 
I  shall  give  it.  I  know  what  I  am  doing.  I  am 
free  with  the  freedom  that  enables  a  man  to  make 
the  grand  disposal  of  his  life.'^  Like  that  we  all 
have  to  feel.  Neither  fate  nor  predestination, 
neither  circumstance  nor  condition  can  destroy 
that  freedom  without  destroying  the  man  him- 
self. A  man's  life  decisions  at  last  must  be 
made  in  freedom,  or  they  are  not  decisions  at 
all.  We  must  go  through  that  gateway  as  Jesus 
did. 

Second:  So  also  our  decisions  must  be  made 
with  single-heartedness,  which  is  an  absolutely 
essential  quality  in  their  making.  In  the  genera- 
tion just  before  this,  in  the  weariness  due  to  the 
complexities  that  had  grown  up  in  modern  civili- 
zation and  threatened  to  smother  life  and  char- 
acter, certain  prophets,  one  in  particular,  widely 
proclaimed  the  gospel  of  the  simple  life.  It  was 
a  word  greatly  needing  to  be  spoken  and  widely 
quoted  when  spoken.  The  favorite  text  was,  "The 
simplicity  which  is  in  Christ.^'  But  the  popular 
mind  largely  missed  the  real  meaning  of  both  the 
text  and  the  idea.  It  straightway  went  to  cutting 
things  out  of  life,  diminishing  its  contents,  and 
actually  impoverishing  life  itself.  You  do  not 
gain  anything  by  reducing  life  to  its  lowest  terms. 
You  can  make  it  empty  and  barren,  shallow  and 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— II      47 

meager,  but  that  is  not  the  simple  life  at  all. 
Professor  Peabody  has  described  it  in  admirable 
terms  which  I  quote:  ''Simplicity  means  single- 
ness, directness,  straightforwardness,  deliverance 
from  the  tortuous  and  the  complex."  The  text 
should  read:  ''The  singleheartedness  which  is  to- 
ward Christ."  That  was  his  bearing  toward  his 
own  work.  He  had  no  division  of  interest.  It  is 
hard  to  tangle  or  defeat  a  person  like  this.  The 
eye  being  single  still  guarantees  that  the  body 
shall  be  full  of  light.  Savonarola  said  to  his 
accusers,  "My  secrets  have  been  few  because  my 
purposes  have  been  great.''  Ambassador  Jusse- 
rand  said  that  George  Washington  was  tl^e  "con- 
vinced partisan  of  the  straight  line."  And  that 
is  the  only  way  into  truth  or  perfect  service.  I 
used  to  hear  a  sentence  like  this :  "Straight  is  the 
line  of  duty,  curved  is  the  line  of  beauty."  The 
inference  always  seemed  to  be  that  the  line  of 
duty  was  ugly.  But  when  a  man  makes  such  a 
line  with  his  life,  as  Jesus  did,  it  looks  radiantly 
beautiful  in  this  curved  and  winding  world. 

It  is  very  easy  to  wreck  life  by  decisions  w  hich 
really  divide  life.  You  cannot  serve  two  masters, 
even  two  good  ones.  You  cannot  have  two  coun- 
tries, two  flags,  two  contending  loyalties.  Con- 
secration to  money-making  wdth  benevolence  as 
a  by-product  usually  ends  in  benevolence  getting 
the  short  end  both  of  the  consecration  and  the 


48  THIS  MIND 

product.  We  are  a  queer  lot,  we  men  and  women 
are.  We  might  as  well  take  ourselves  as  we  are 
instead  of  trying  to  idealize  ourselves.  And  the 
plain  fact  is  that  a  complete  lifetime  of  Christ- 
like singleheartedness  toward  our  task  is  not 
easy.  And  yet  when  we  see  it  in  him  it  looks  like 
the  only  thing  for  him  or  for  us. 

Third :  There  is  a  third  gateway  into  the  con- 
sideration of  life's  decisions  and  that  is  the  gate- 
way of  moral  integrity.  Far  deeper  than  any 
question  of  the  particular  thing  you  are  going 
to  do  in  the  world  is  the  question  of  the  kind  of 
person  you  mean  to  be  while  doing  it.  Every 
man  tapes  the  double  problem  of  his  task  and  his 
character,  his  work  and  his  personality.  Neither 
can  be  taken  for  granted,  though  unhappily  both 
often  are.  Put  in  another  form  this  problem 
would  be.  Does  a  life  decision  look  toward  and 
promise  ever-improving  and  expanding  service, 
the  constant  doing  of  better  work  right  down 
to  the  end  of  the  day,  and  at  the  same  time  does 
it  make  possible  the  preservation  and  develop- 
ment of  personality  in  its  integrity  and  moral 
soundness?  I  am  not  introducing  here  an  im- 
aginary difflculty,  though  it  is  a  difficulty  that  is 
more  apparent  to  a  man  of  sixty  than  it  is  to  one 
of  twenty.  At  the  earlier  age  there  is  a  kind  of 
golden  glow  over  life  and  its  occupations.  At 
that  age  we  are  crusaders  and  dreamers.    Every- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S   DECISIONS— II      49 

thing  seems  possible  to  us.  No  matter  what  we 
are  planning  to  be^  we  fully  intend  to  climb  our 
hill  of  the  Lord  with  clean  hands  and  pure  hearts. 
We  do  not  propose  to  lift  up  our  souls  unto 
vanity  or  to  swear  deceitfully.  We  have  no 
doubts  either  as  to  the  wisdom  or  as  to  the  possi- 
bility of  our  course. 

The  world  would  be  in  sad  case  if  youth  did 
not  have  this  spirit,  if  this  current  of  high  pur- 
pose and  expectation  were  not  constantly  refresh- 
ing the  stream  that  tends  to  grow  muddy  and 
heavy,  to  lose  the  sparkle  and  transparency  of  its 
earlier  stages.  But  it  would  not  be  in  harmony 
with  life's  facts  if  I  did  not  forewarn  you  of  the 
sure  coming  of  moral  difficulties  that  will 
threaten  both  life  and  character;  the  coming  of 
days  when  you  will  be  tempted  to  doubt  even  the 
possibility  of  preserving  your  moral  integrity  in 
your  calling,  in  the  world  as  it  is ;  the  sure  com- 
ing of  suggestions  of  such  compromise  of  prin- 
ciple as  Avill  rot  the  tree  of  your  life  at  its  root 
and  its  heart.  I  am  not  speaking  of  the  ordinary 
vulgar  temptations  to  do  wrong,  the  temptations 
to  lie,  to  cheat,  to  take  unfair  advantage,  or  the 
gross  temptations  to  lust  or  evil  habits.  These 
are  bad  enough,  and  in  our  day,  the  day  of  the 
moral  backwash  that  follows  the  war,  they  are  all 
too  prevalent  and  common.  The  moral  sag,  the 
easy  talk  of  changed  standards,  and  the  winking 


50  THIS  MIND 

at  unlovely  practices  make  a  new  moral  situation 
that  must  profoundly  affect  all  our  work  for  a 
better  world.  But  I  am  speaking  of  that  far 
deeper,  deadlier  conviction  which  declares  that 
the  spirit  and  principles  of  Jesus  cannot  be  ap- 
plied and  practiced  in  modern  life  at  all ;  that  we 
have  to  take  the  world  as  it  is,  and  that  there  is 
no  use  in  attempting  the  impossible.  Millions  of 
men  who  are  good  men  as  men  go,  who  do  not  at 
all  mean  to  be  bad  men,  who  would  scorn  to  tell 
a  lie  or  steal  a  dollar,  are  living  and  think  they 
are  compelled  to  live  in  a  sort  of  moral  compro- 
mise which  weakens  their  soul's  vigor  and  in- 
tegrity. They  would  not  dream  of  calling  black 
white  or  white  black,  but  in  the  heart  of  them 
they  suspect  that  a  mixed  gray  life  is  about  the 
best  that  can  be  done.  They  would  scorn  to 
make  immoral  decisions,  knowing  them  to  be 
such,  but  they  do  make  vital  and  fundamental 
decisions  that  cut  the  nerve  of  real  morality  and 
strike  at  the  root  of  the  soul's  life.  They  quote, 
usually  with  a  smile  to  indicate  that  they  see 
its  weakness,  the  advice  of  the  ancient  moralist 
who  exhorted  his  disciples  to  "walk  the  straight 
and  narrow  path  between  right  and  wrong.-' 
Nevertheless,  as  practical  men  they  regard  the 
advice  as  rather  reasonable  though  not  very 
ideal.  It  sounds  so  sensible  to  talk  of  middle-of- 
the-road  morality.     It  would  not  be  fair  not  to 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— II      51 

tell  you  that  this  doubt  exists  and  is  widespread, 
not  among  the  worst  men,  but  among  many  men 
who  wish  it  otherwise,  the  doubt  as  to  the  pos- 
sibility of  the  perfectly  white  life  in  a  lot  of  the 
occupations  into  which  you  ought  to  go,  into 
which  you  desire  to  go,  occupations  having  a 
really  useful  and  essential  place  in  the  world  in 
which  you  are  to  live.  The  doubt  is  not  always 
formulated  or  expressed,  but  it  exists.  The 
world  is  full  of  Herods  and  John  the  Baptists, 
and  contains  lots  of  people  who  think  the  wise 
and  safe  course  for  life  lies  somewhere  between 
the  two.  This  attitude  is  supposed  to  be  very 
judicious  and  full  of  plain  common  sense.  And 
plain  common  sense  as  it  exists  among  men  is 
morally  a  pretty  poor  thing.  It  is  morality  re- 
duced to  an  ordinary  working  basis,  "not  too 
good  for  human  nature's  dailij  food."  It  takes 
great  pride  in  shunning  "counsels  of  perfection. '^ 
If  you  make  your  life  decisions  on  this  moral 
basis  or  try  to  live  your  life  on  this  basis,  you 
are  simply  laying  the  foundations  for  moral  in- 
competence, wreck  and  inefficiency.  Xo  skill  will 
enable  you  to  steer  straight  through  a  compro- 
mise moral  channel.  Here,  above  all  places,  you 
will  find  that  you  cannot  serve  two  masters. 
Nothing  can  be  done  with  or  by  a  morally  divided 
soul,  a  soul  without  truth  in  its  inward  parts. 
God  has  lost  a  thousand  chances  in  human  his- 


52  THIS  MIND 

tory  by  reason  of  men  who  have  tried  to  obey  both 
God  and  men,  to  serve  both  God  and  mammon,  to 
be  straight  and  "sensible"  at  the  same  time.  He 
really  has  only  had  one  first-class,  one  perfect 
moral  chance  in  that  one  soul,  straight,  sensi- 
tive and  true  in  a  generation  as  crooked  and  per- 
verse as  our  own,  the  soul  that  never  accommo- 
dated his  ideals  to  his  surroundings.  An  old 
man,  wise  and  saintly,  beautiful  in  life  and  char- 
acter, told  generation  after  generation  of  stu- 
dents in  a.  certain  college  this  fundamental 
thing:  "It  is  always  right  to  do  right.  It  is 
never  right  to  do  wrong."  But  that  deep  rule 
applies  not  primarily  to  the  particular  cases 
that  arise  in  daily  life.  It  applies  especially  in 
the  making  of  the  fundamental  life  decisions 
which  will  largely  determine  the  problems  that 
will  arise  day  by  day.  Many  a  man  is  wrecked 
in  the  particular  crisis  because  he  has  no  general, 
controlling  principle  to  guide  and  steady  him. 
Silas  Marner  is  one  of  the  most  perfect  short 
stories  in  any  literature.  In  it,  blazing  out  of  a 
man's  bitter  experience,  is  a  sentence  that  shines 
like  a  ray  of  light  from  the  throne  of  light: 
"Nothing  is  ever  worth  doing  wrong  for." 

This  thing  is  all  mixed  up  with  our  estimate 
of  values  and  w^hat  is  worth  while.  And  worldly 
wisdom  is  very  sure  of  itself,  so  sure  that  it  con- 
fidently advises  youth  when  life's  issues  are  at 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— II      53 

stake,  when  youth  is  making  its  life  decisions. 
And  the  worldly  wisdom  that  is  tainted  with 
moral  doubt,  doubt  as  to  the  possibility  of  a 
moral  life,  twisted  with  the  spirit  of  moral  com- 
promise, is  blistered  to  death  by  one  red-hot  ex- 
pression spoken  by  the  Master  of  life,  the  one 
person  who  knew  what  is  possible  in  life.  He 
had  tried  and  had  not  let  down,  had  not  given 
up,  had  not  compromised  at  any  point.  He  kept 
his  soul  as  intact  as  his  seamless  robe.  He  knew 
what  could  be  done  because  he  had  done  it.  And 
he  said  in  never-to-be-forgotten  message  of  speech 
and  life :  There  is  nothing  worth  giving  your  soul 
to  get.  There  are  dozens  of  things  worth  giving 
your  lives  for,  but  nothing  in  any  world  worth 
giving  your  soul  for.  And  that  principle  stands 
here  where  you  are  making  your  life  decisions. 
It  is  the  unchangeable  basis  of  the  big  decision. 
In  it  all  lesser  choices  must  be  made  as  life  goes 
on. 

In  my  youth  I  used  to  hear  some  very  dreary 
and  misleading  preaching  on  the  unpardonable 
sin.  It  proceeded  upon  a  wholly  false  distinction 
between  the  second  and  third  Persons  in  the 
Holy  Trinity  and  left  the  impression  that  you 
could  sin  against  the  second  Person  and  be  for- 
given, but  that  sinning  against  the  third  Person 
was  a  much  more  serious  matter,  that  he  was  not 
so  easy,  that  he  was  much  more  sensitive  to 


54  THIS  MIXD 

injury  and  wrong;  or  that  the  forgiving  God 
would  not  stand  for  any  sin  against  the  third 
Person,  however  far  he  would  go  in  case  of  the 
second.  And  he  did  go  very  far.  Now,  all  that 
seems  very  far  from  any  ethical  reality  or  from 
having  any  meaning  for  actual  life.  Surely,  the 
one  teacher  who  kept  closest  to  reality  never  was 
guilty  of  such  a  purely  theoretical,  metaphysical 
muddle  as  that.  Any  really  honest  person  can 
see  the  real  meaning  of  this  if  he  tries.  It  is 
Jesus'  way  of  saying  that  the  deliberate  reversal 
of  the  eternal  moral  order,  the  making  morally 
black  morally  white,  the  making  moral  wrong 
moral  right  in  choice  and  practice,  in  judgment 
and  action,  the  violation  of  the  very  spirit  of 
truth,  righteousness,  and  holiness  is  beyond  for- 
giveness ;  that  there  is  no  basis  of  forgiveness  for 
such  a  course  in  any  of  the  righteous  God's 
worlds  anywhere.  That  was  the  awful  thing  in 
the  German  scholars'  defense  of  the  German 
war,  that  they  gave  their  moral  approval  and 
sanction  to  the  utterly  immoral  course  of  their 
country. 

I  do  not  say  nor  feel  called  to  say  how  far  you 
can  go  in  trying  the  patience,  the  kindness,  the 
grace  of  Jesus  Christ,  and  succeed  with  it.  He 
is  so  patient  that  men  ought  to  be  ashamed  to  try 
his  patience.  I  do  say  that  you  cannot,  in  your 
life  decisions  or  your  life  practices  and  attitudes. 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— II      55 

flout  the  spirit  of  right,  the  spirit  of  holiness,  and 
get  away  with  it  at  all,  in  this  world  or  any  other. 
The  ethical  basis  of  your  decisions  will  not  bear 
trifling  or  stand  violation. 

As  I  was  on  my  w^ay  recently  to  an  Eastern 
university  where  I  am  privileged  to  preach  each 
year,  I  chanced  to  find  the  president  of  the  uni- 
versity on  the  train.  We  talked  freely  of  many 
things  as  we  went  on  for  a  few  hours  together. 
He  is  not  a  clergyman,  nor  a  religious  extremist, 
but  as  we  talked  he  urged  me  to  preach  on  my 
next  visit  to  the  university  on  this  ethical  basis 
of  life  at  the  time  when  it  is  taking  shape  in 
young  life.  He  said  in  substance:  ^'Our  young 
men  are  confused,  not  as  to  what  moral  standards 
there  are,  but  as  to  whether  there  are  any  that 
bind  them.  They  are  divided  in  their  minds  as 
to  the  possibility  of  a  right  world.  They  are  not 
sure  that  the  wages  of  sin  is  so  severe  as  death. 
They  regard  most  of  the  talk  about  it  as  psy- 
chologically wrong.  They  have  no  keen  sense  of 
God  and  his  relation  to  the  world.  They  are  not 
at  all  convinced  that  the  men  or  the  nations 
who  go  too  far,  who  get  presumptuous,  will  soon 
or  late  come  straight  up  against  him  and  his 
throne  in  the  world.^'  Much  more  he  said,  all 
to  the  same  purpose.  In  making  life  decisions 
you  must  hold  clearly  the  everlasting  difference 
between  right  and  wrong.    And  you  must  enter 


56  THIS  MIND 

life  through  the  proper  gate.    There  is  no  other 
way. 

Finally,  for  to-day,  as  you  make  your  decision 
you  must  go  through  the  gateway  of  unity.  Of 
course,  I  do  not  mean  unity  of  the  churches. 
That  is  another  and  very  interesting  subject. 
Here  we  are  considering  personal  unity.  The 
moral  distractions  and  divisions  of  the  world  are 
very  real,  but  internal  confusion  is  just  as  real. 
Jesus  made  his  way  through  the  world's  tangled 
paths  not  because  those  paths  were  clear  and 
simple  but  because  his  own  eye  was  single.  The 
ways  of  his  day  were  as  perplexing  and  confused 
as  the  ways  of  ours.  His  contemporaries  easily 
lost  their  way,  but  he  kept  his.  We  are  not  con- 
scious, as  we  study  his  life,  of  any  of  those  ruin- 
ous contradictions  so  easily  manifest  in  the  lives 
of  other  men.  I  am  as  far  as  anybody  from  wish- 
ing to  advise  the  impossible.  The  weaknesses  of 
human  nature  are  as  evident  to  me  as  to  anyone. 
The  words  of  Saint  Paul,  that  had  a  far  nobler 
application  in  his  case,  I  sadly  make  my  own :  "I 
bear  about  the  marks''  of  human  imperfection, 
but  it  is  not  a  thing  to  boast  of  or  to  take  in  a 
flippant  spirit.  The  life  of  Jesus  in  ways  which 
surely  are  practical  and  imitable  looks  a  lot  bet- 
ter than  the  lives  which  w^e  so  easily  take  for 
granted  as  being  the  best  we  can  expect.  I  do 
not  believe  they  are  the  best  we  have  a  right  to 


TOWARD   LIFE'S   DECISIONS— II      57 

expect.  Maybe  your  generation  will  make  an 
offering  of  personal  unity,  unity  of  character;, 
that  no  previous  generation  has  made.  If  it 
does,  the  world  will  go  forward  as  it  has  not  done 
in  any  period  since  Jesus  Christ  ascended.  May- 
be out  of  this  group  will  come  one,  ten,  fifty, 
a  hundred  men  and  women  who  will  close  the 
chasms  that  other  lives  have  shown.  Anyhow,  a 
genuine  life  decision  for  character  and  for  occu- 
pation must  take  account  of  the  unity  of  life, 
and  it  must  take  that  account  when  life  is  young, 
or  it  cannot  do  it  to  the  best  purpose. 

You  will  hardly  need  to  be  told  that  the  term 
"unity"  while  single  in  itself  is  not  an  entirely 
simple  term.  It  represents  the  outcome  of  many 
and  even  diverse  elements.  Life's  unity  can  be 
broken  and  destroyed  in  many  ways,  by  the 
absence  or  the  maladjustment  of  many  elements. 
Or  it  can  be  broken  at  one  or  many  places  and  its 
perfection  prevented  or  destroyed.  But  in  mak^ 
ing  your  life  decision  you  must  have  in  mind  all 
the  main  features  that  go  to  make  this  perfect 
integrity  of  life.  If  your  decision  to  enter  a 
special  calling  is  going  to  make  impossible  for 
you  any  of  these  fundamental  unities,  doubt  that 
decision,  turn  away  from  that  calling.  For  ex- 
ample, men  go  into  certain  occupations  knowing 
that  in  them  there  will  be,  perhaps  must  be,  a 
lifelong  warfare  between  their  private  convic- 


58  THIS  MIND 

tions  and  their  public  beliefs,  a  life  that  will 
compel  them  to  act  against  their  personal  sense 
of  what  is  right.  Men  have  invented  a  philosophy 
to  justify  this  ethical  anomaly,  knowing  all  the 
time  that  in  the  moral  universe  of  God,  in  the 
world  in  which  Jesus  lives,  the  thing  simply  can- 
not be  justified.  You  will  be  conforming  to  the 
usages  of  your  ancestors  and  the  practices  of  the 
world  if  you  accept  and  follow  that  world-old 
philosophy,  but  you  will  be  straight  up  against 
this  word,  this  true,  sound  word,  in  so  doing: 
"Do  not  follow  the  customs  of  the  present  age, 
but  be  transformed  by  the  entire  renewal  of  your 
minds  so  that  you  may  learn  by  experience  what 
God's  will  is — that  will  which  is  good  and  beau- 
tiful and  perfect."  You  can  take  one  philosophy 
and  secure  life's  unity  as  Jesus  did.  You  can 
take  the  other  and  miss  it  as  the  present  age  and 
past  ages  have  done.  This,  again,  is  a  thing  to 
be  adopted  as  a  controlling  principle  governing 
individual  crises  and  not  simply  to  be  put  into 
operation  on  occasion  as  an  exceptional  exercise 
of  virtue.  You  never  wonder  what  Jesus  will  do 
in  a  given  case.    You  know  the  rule  of  his  life. 

So  too  you  must  observe  and  apply  the  prin- 
ciple of  unity  in  your  life  decision  where  that 
principle  cuts  across  other  practices  that  de- 
stroy life's  integrity  and  oneness.  It  is  not 
necessary  to  discuss  them  at  length.     They  are 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— II      59 

too  often  regarded  simply  as  inconsistencies,  as 
evidences  of  common  human  imperfection.  At 
their  worst  we  call  them  hypocrisies.  But  we 
would  be  wiser  if  we  saw  how  deep  their  roots 
run  and  how  they  are  related  to  the  essential 
and  vital  integrity  of  personality  and  character. 
It  is  not  a  light  and  insignificant  thing  that  there 
is  such  a  gap  between  what  men  know  and  what 
they  do,  between  what  they  are  and  what  they 
say.  And  it  is  very  far  from  being  a  trifling 
thing  when  any  man  knows  that  his  inner  life  is 
so  nearly  all  wrong  and  in  such  contradiction  to 
his  outward  life.  Jesus  was  working  on  a  pro- 
found knowledge  of  human  nature  when  he 
talked  so  much  and  so  plainly  about  the  thoughts 
of  men  as  distinguished  from  their  conduct; 
about  the  murderers  who  only  wish  they 
could  kill;  the  people  who  think  with 
bitterness  and  anger  and  speak  buttered,  honeyed 
words  which  they  do  not  mean;  the  mental 
adulterers  who  keep  their  minds  full  of  pictures 
that  stain  and  defile  the  very  stuff  of  the  mind, 
until  the  mind  itself  becomes  darkened  and  in- 
capable of  straight,  clear  thinking.  You  say  that 
this  fact  in  life  has  nothing  to  do  with  one's 
particular  occupation,  but  has  wholly  to  do  with 
one's  character  in  any  calling,  which  is  largely 
true.  There  are  no  callings  in  which  one  is  auto- 
matically protected  against  these  internal  con- 


60  THIS  MIND 

tradictions,  none  in  which  internal  unity  is 
secured  without  personal  effort.  Some  are  bet- 
ter than  others.  In  some  the  weight  of  influences 
goes  one  way  and  in  some  it  goes  the  other.  I 
am  saying  all  this  that  I  may  urge  you  not  to 
make  your  decisions  in  ignorance  or  disregard 
of  the  need  for  this  unity,  or  with  a  funda- 
mentally false  attitude  toward  it,  but  that  you 
may  be  urged  to  shun  the  callings  that  make 
internal  unity  virtually  impossible;  to  choose 
the  calling  which  calls  for  the  deepest  consis- 
tency of  life  and  character;  to  commit  yourself 
without  reserve  to  the  principle  of  unity  in  your 
life;  and  to  make  a  world,  as  far  as  you  can, 
which  shall  have  in  it  ever  larger  numbers  who 
have  won  freedom  from  the  destructive  internal 
strife  all  too  well  known  among  men.  If  you  say 
this  cannot  be  done,  there  is  an  easy  and  plain 
answer:  Jesus  did  it.  His  life  was  not  torn 
with  internal  moral  contradictions.  He  was  not 
prevented  from  making  his  perfect  impression 
or  doing  his  full  work  by  any  breaks  between  his 
internal  life  and  its  external  impression.  He 
perplexed  people  at  times,  but  they  were  people 
so  used  to  moral  compromises  and  accommoda- 
tions that  they  could  not  understand  a  perfectly 
transparent  life  like  his.  We  need  not  claim  to 
be  wiser  or  better  than  were  the  men  around 
him,  but  such  has  been  his  influence  in  the  cen- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S   DECISIONS— II      61 

turies  that  whatever  our  own  lives,  he  looks  like 
the  only  real  thing  to  us  when  we  are  thinking 
straight  and  are  at  our  best.  This  mind  that  was 
in  him  looks  like  the  mind  that  should  be  in  us. 

The  men  of  my  generation  read,  when  they 
were  young,  Tom  Broicu'S  School  Days.  Thou- 
sands of  them  remember  the  words  of  the  author 
about  the  teaching  of  Arnold,  words  which  gave 
a  new  outlook  to  many  a  boy  when  as  jet  the 
day  was  in  its  morning. 

"He  certainly  did  teach  us — thank  God  for 
it — that  we  could  not  cut  our  life  into  slices  and 
say,  'In  this  slice  your  actions  are  indifferent, 
and  you  need  not  trouble  your  heads  about  them 
one  way  or  another ;  but  in  this  slice,  mind  what 
you  are  about,  for  they  are  important.'  A  pretty 
muddle  we  should  have  been  in  had  we  done  so. 
He  taught  us  that  in  this  wonderful  world  no 
boy  or  man  can  tell  which  of  his  actions  is  in- 
different and  which  not;  that  by  a  thoughtless 
w^ord  or  look  we  may  lead  astray  a  brother  for 
whom  Christ  died.  He  taught  us  that  life  is  a 
whole,  made  up  of  actions  and  thoughts  and 
longings,  great  and  small,  noble  and  ignoble; 
therefore  the  only  true  wisdom  for  man  or  boy 
is  to  bring  the  whole  life  into  obedience  to  Him 
whose  world  we  live  in  and  who  has  purchased 
us  with  his  blood;  and  that  whether  we  eat  or 
drink,  or  whatsoever  we  do,  we  are  to  do  all  in 


G2  THIS  MIND 

his  name  and  to  his  glory;  in  such  teaching, 
faithfully,  as  it  seems  to  me,  following  that  of 
Paul  of  Tarsus,  who  was  in  the  habit  of  meaning 
what  he  said,  and  who  laid  down  this  standard 
for  every  man  and  boy  in  his  time.  I  think  it 
lies  w^ith  those  who  say  that  such  teaching  will 
not  do  for  us  now  to  show  why  a  teacher  in  the 
nineteenth  century  is  to  preach  a  lower  standard 
than  one  in  the  first.'- 

In  this  teaching  Arnold  not  only  followed 
Saint  Paul,  but  followed  particularly  that  greater 
Teacher,  Saint  Paul's  Master.  Until  some  one 
can  show  some  better  way,  surely  this  is  the 
true  way  to  follow. 

There  is  another  form  of  unity  that  must  have 
a  word  before  we  close.  It  runs  straight  into  the 
business  of  life  decisions  and  runs  on  into  life 
itself.  For  our  decisions  are  not  for  the  moment, 
but  for  the  ages,  not  for  the  decision's  sake,  but 
for  the  life's  sake.  There  are  two  ways  of  look- 
ing at  life.  You  can  take  the  short  view  or  the 
long  view.  You  can  do  what  has  been  called 
^'short-range  thinking"  or  you  can  do  long-range 
thinking,  but  by  only  one  way  can  you  secure  and 
preserve  the  vital,  essential  unity  between  the 
first  of  life  and  the  last  of  it,  or  the  unity  that 
runs  like  a  living,  expanding  stream  through  the 
ripening  years.  Life  decisions  cannot  be  changed 
every  few  years  in  their  fundamental  principles, 


TOWARD  LIFE'S   DECISIONS— II      63 

even  though  life's  occupations  may  change  their 
form.  Any  change  in  the  form  of  one's  life 
must  be  made  in  obedience  to  the  deep  and  abid- 
ing principles  that  control  the  whole  life,  or  the 
unity  of  life  is  wholly  broken.  I  have  purposely 
refrained  from  advising  you  to  enter  any  partic- 
ular calling  such  as  preaching,  teaching,  medi- 
cine, or  law,  though  even  in  the  particular  matter 
I  advise  with  all  my  heart  that  you  decide  at 
the  beginning  for  the  thing  you  would  like  to 
do,  the  thing  you  ought  to  do,  the  thing  the  world 
will  most  need  to  have  you  do,  through  the  long 
years  that  lie  ahead  of  you,  the  half  century 
that  will  be  God's  gift  to  many  of  you.  Begin 
with  the  life  you  want  to  carry  through,  the  one 
you  can  carry  through.  Certain  occupations 
are  only  temporary.  They  are  young  men's  tasks. 
If  you  choose  one  of  them,  do  it  on  such  a  basis 
that  you  can  change  without  wreck.  You  must 
be  able  to  go  in  the  same  direction.  Not  so 
clearly  more  than  forty  years  ago  as  now,  but 
clearly  even  then,  it  seemed  to  me  that  the  thing 
I  would  be  wanting  to  do  through  the  day  and 
when  the  evening  came  was  to  preach  the  glorious 
gospel  of  the  blessed  God.  It  so  looked  then.  It 
especially  so  looked  in  those  golden  days  when 
we  were  hearing  Phillips  Brooks.  More  than 
ever  it  looks  so  now.  But  to  other  men,  class- 
mates and  contemporaries,  other  callings  stood 


64  THIS  MIND 

up  like  angels  of  light  and  called.  And  honor- 
ably, happily,  usefully,  they  have  walked  with 
those  other  callings  through  '^the  long,  long  trail 
that  still  keeps  winding  down  through  years.'' 
You  must  reckon  with  the  vision  of  the  years 
rather  than  the  vision  of  the  hour. 

But  I  am  anxious  with  unconcealed  concern 
not  about  your  particular  decision,  but  about  the 
general  control  of  your  life  until  the  eternal 
morning  breaks.  I  want  you  now  to  give  life  the 
tone,  the  direction,  the  spirit,  the  basis,  the 
governing  purpose  and  aim  it  should  carry  until 
the  earthly  end  of  it.  Thus  you  can  escape  the 
tragedy  of  a  life  that  breaks  in  the  middle,  a  life 
that  finds  it  has  gone  wrong  up  to  its  noon,  and 
then  must  turn  around  and  painfully  try  to  re- 
trace steps  already  taken,  or  to  make  as  much  as 
possible  out  of  what  time  is  left.  Biography  has 
many  pathetic,  pitiful  chapters,  chapters  which 
record  failure  and  calamity,  chapters  which 
record  the  misuse  of  high  and  commanding  abili- 
ties, and  those  which  tell  the  stories  of  Lucifers 
fallen  from  heaven,  but  there  is  nothing  in  biog- 
raphy sadder  than  the  stories  of  men  whose  lives 
have  had  the  wrong  direction,  the  wrong  tone, 
the  wrong  spirit  through  the  length  of  it,  or  the 
story  of  men  in  the  afternoon  of  life  trying  to 
atone  for  its  morning. 

Many  names  could  be  mentioned  as  warnings. 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  DECISIONS— II      65 

I  prefer  to  turn  your  minds  as  we  conclude  our 
study  for  to-day  to  the  one  perfect  example  of 
how  it  has  been  done,  and  how  it  should  be  done. 
Elsewhere  and  in  many  ways  I  have  spoken  of 
features  of  Jesus'  life  as  both  events  and  prin- 
ciples. Here  as  truly  as  anywhere  that  law  of 
interpretation  holds.  What  he  did  was  an  event. 
The  event  in  his  life  was  also  a  principle  for  the 
wide  reach  of  human  life  through  the  years.  He 
walks  beside  modern  boys  of  twelve,  in  temples, 
in  schoolyards  and  in  homes,  saying,  '^We  must  be 
about  our  Father's  business."  He  goes  into  every 
college  chapel  and  every  student  conference  and 
says  to  the  men  and  women:  ^^The  spirit  of  the 
Lord  is  upon  us,  upon  you  and  me,  for  he  has 
anointed  us  to  give  humanity  a  new  chance."  He 
walks  beside  men  and  women,  in  many  occupa- 
tions, in  all  lands,  as  one  of  them,  saying:  ''We 
must  work  the  works  of  Him  that  sent  us  and 
finish  his  work,  you  and  I.  The  day  is  long  and 
the  work  hard,  but  we  have  put  our  hands  to  the 
plow,  to  make  a  new  furrow  straight  across  the 
world.  We  will  not  look  back,  will  we?"  He 
stands  in  the  night  beside  missionaries,  and  mis- 
sionaries to  be,  beside  those  toilers  among  people 
the  world  does  not  care  for,  those  the  supercilious 
call  outcasts,  and  he  says  to  those  friends  of  his : 
''There  are  other  sheep,  not  of  the  official  fold; 
w^e  must  get  them  and  bring  them,  you  and  L 


66  THIS  MIND 

They  are  very  foolish  some  of  them,  even  for 
sheep,  and  some  of  them  are  out  in  the  moun- 
tains. The  night  is  very  dark  and  the  storm  is 
very  severe,  but  we  do  not  flinch,  do  we,  nor  care 
how  dark  is  the  night  that  we  must  pass  through, 
or  how  deep  the  waters  we  must  cross.  They  will 
not  know  what  it  cost  us  to  get  them.  That  does 
not  matter.  We  must  not  lose  them.  Come  on." 
And  they  come  on.  And  ever  and  again  as  we  go 
on  with  him,  governed  by  his  principles,  sharing 
his  life,  controlled  by  his  spirit,  we  hear  a  voice 
at  the  river  side  or  on  the  mountain  top  saying, 
^^This  is  my  son,-'  and  we  look  at  him,  and  he 
looks  back  at  us  with  the  words,  ''He  means  both 
of  us.-'  Then  we  go  on  again,  always  with  our 
faces  set  the  same  way,  and  one  day  we  modestly 
say  to  the  Father  of  us  all,  ''I  have  finished  what 
you  gave  me  to  do,"  and  he  replies:  "That  will 
answer.  Come  on  up.  The  Great  Companion  is 
just  inside." 

''Let  this  mind  be  in  us  which  was  also  in 
Christ  Jesus." 


Ill 

THIS  MIND  TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS 

A  VERY  careful  student  of  current  English  life 
declares  that  ^'one  of  the  most  pestiferous,  devas- 
tating delusions  that  has  ever  taken  captive  the 
human  mind  is  now  rampant  in  the  British  Isles. 
It  is  that  nothing  matters  very  much." 

"The  lightning  glares  and  reddens 
Across    the   skies ; 
It  seems  but  sunset 

To  those  sleeping  eyes." 

This  blase  attitude  is  not  wholly  unknown  among 
us.  It  is  rather  easily  explained  as  the  normal 
reaction  from  the  days  when  we  were  over- 
wrought. But  whoever  takes  this  attitude  just 
now  is  guilty  of  ''short-range  thinking."  Indiffer- 
ence to  life's  long  objects  in  a  day  of  universal 
rebuilding  is  a  crime  against  personality,  against 
the  present  and  future  of  mankind,  against  that 
one  Person  whose  concerns  were  never  more 
acute  than  at  this  hour  in  the  world's  develop- 
ment. Yet  when  one,  even  partially  aware  of 
Jesus'  interest  in  the  world,  speaks  to  youth  with 
an  extra  warmth  or  passion  he  is  likely  not  to 
be  understood.     And  some  will  wonder  why  he 

67 


68  THIS  MIND 

is  so  earnest,  and  others  regard  him  as  over- 
wrought and  overheated.  Men  easily  responded 
to  the  most  intense  speech  four  and  five  years 
ago,  but  now  the  cooling  process  has  reached 
down  to  the  very  depths.  I  cannot  think,  how- 
ever, that  the  cooling  process  or  the  indifferent 
spirit  has  got  hold  of  Jesus.  To  him  surely 
things  matter  very  much. 

And  we  must  stand  with  him  as  we  make  up 
our  minds,  which  is  another,  older  way  of  saying 
as  we  make  our  life  decisions  as  to  life's  objects. 
There  are  no  other  principles  and  there  is  no 
other  personal  presence  than  his  in  this  supreme 
hour.  Fortunately,  he  belongs  to  no  particular 
calling.  He  was  the  perfect  preacher,  but  was 
not  a  clergyman,  the  greatest  teacher,  but  not  a 
professor,  the  perfect  physician,  but  not  a  doctor. 
He  belongs  equally  to  men  in  all  good  occupa- 
tions. And  as  you  stand  beside  him  the  whole 
idea  of  a  special  call  to  certain  forms  of  life 
seems  not  quite  so  sure  as  it  used  to.  He  seems 
interested  in  whatever  men  can  do  or  be.  Time 
was  when  the  idea  of  a  special  call  to  the  minis- 
try or  missionary  service  pretty  nearly  seemed  to 
exhaust  God's  interest  in  men's  lifework,  as 
though  he  had  to  do  with  men  going  into  those 
callings  and  went  in  with  them,  but  if  men  and 
women  went  into  any  other  callings  they  went  on 
their  own  responsibility,  without  his  having  any- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  69 

thing-  special  to  do  with  it.  And  that  had  an- 
other element,  namely,  that  only  certain  men  and 
women,  those  who  were  planning  to  do  these 
things,  were  at  all  obliged  to  refer  their  decisions 
to  or  test  the  objects  of  their  lives  by  the  high 
principles  and  character  of  Jesus ;  that  men  look- 
ing toward  the  ministry  had  to,  but  men  look- 
ing toward  law  did  not  need  to.  You  can  see 
where  this  leads  when  once  it  is  stated.  Of 
course  it  was  a  part  of  that  wretched  old  divi- 
sion between  the  sacred  and  the  secular,  which 
perhaps  ought  not  to  be  too  severely  criticized. 
It  was  something,  after  all,  to  have  rescued  one 
or  two  occupations  and  small  parts  of  life  from 
the  total,  universal  secularizing  process.  Against 
it  have  come  two  reactions,  one  that  all  callings 
are  equally  secular,  the  other  that  all  are  equally 
holy.  The  true  reaction  is  that  those  occupations 
and  callings  are  holy  which  men  and  women 
enter  and  live  in  on  the  principles  and  in  the 
fellowship  of  Jesus.  That  extends  the  area  of 
the  sacred  until  it  covers  a  lot  of  things  like 
Sam  Higginbotham-s  farms  and  the  work  of 
thousands  besides.  The  sacred  area  in  any  true 
view  of  it  is  not  hard  to  get  into  by  one  making 
a  life  decision.  It  takes  an  act  of  force  and 
violence  to  get  out  of  it  when  one  is  deciding 
what  he  really  sets  before  him  as  a  life  object.  It 
surrounds  us  like  light  and  atmosphere  which 


70  THIS  MIND 

we  must  see  and  breathe  unless  we  plunge  into 
something  else. 

Many  young  people  of  college  age  feel  a  kind 
of  break  between  their  own  lives  and  the  life 
of  Jesus  due  to  the  absence  of  any  full  record 
of  what  he  was  doing  when  he  was  their  age.  He 
appears  in  a  significant  way  when  he  is  a  boy  of 
twelve,  then  disappears  almost  completely  until 
he  is  thirty.  All  that  lies  between  is  left  by  both 
literature  and  art  to  silence  and  imagination. 
There  is  only  that  one  wonderful  sentence :  '^He 
grew  in  wisdom  and  stature."  The  boy  was  be- 
coming a  man.  The  college  man  naturally  feels 
that  he  is  beyond  the  experience  and  feeling  of 
the  boy  of  twelve.  By  precisely  the  same  token 
he  feels  that  he  has  not  quite  reached  the  de- 
velopment of  this  full-bearded  man  of  thirty  who 
comes  to  be  baptized.  Our  college  man  expects 
that  at  thirty  he  will  be  in  full  tide  in  his  early 
career  and  not  just  then  publicly  entering  it.  He 
is  eight  years  older  than  the  Boy  in  the  temple 
and  ten  years  younger  than  the  Man  at  the 
Jordan.  Of  course,  if  the  Gospels  had  chiefly  a 
biographical  interest  in  Jesus,  this  gap  would 
be  fatal.  We  would  not  care  for  a  life  of  Phillips 
Brooks  that  said  nothing  at  all  of  his  Harvard 
years. 

Art  has  followed  the  example  of  literature. 
The  stuff  in  the  Apocryphal   Gospels  has  not 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  71 

given  encouragement  to  go  beyond  the  real  Gos- 
pels. So  that  in  art  there  is  almost  nothing 
after  Hofmann's  beautiful  picture  of  ^'Jesus  and 
the  Doctors/'  until  the  bearded  man  appears  in 
his  full  activity,  in  the  serious  business  of  his 
life.  There  is,  to  be  sure,  one  picture  of  the 
youth  standing  in  the  door  of  the  carpenter  shop 
with  outstretched  arms,  his  shadow  making  the 
figure  of  a  cross  behind  him.  But  for  the  men 
and  women  of  college  age  there  are  no  details  of 
the  life  of  Jesus  at  the  same  age  that  are  at  all 
definite. 

Is  the  loss  a  dead  and  irreparable  loss?  I  can- 
not quite  think  so.  The  silent,  growing  years  are 
not  so  unknown  as  we  may  think.  We  are  per- 
haps as  well  off  in  the  materials  for  understand- 
ing his  personality  as  if  we  had  more  details.  We 
might  easily  get  lost  in  the  details.  After  all, 
it  is  the  adult  life  of  a  person  that  has  meaning 
for  us.  The  Harvard  days  of  Brooks,  the  Cam- 
bridge days  of  Charles  Kingsley,  and  the  Yale 
years  of  Bushnell  interest  us  because  of  what 
those  men  became.  And  we  interpret  their  per- 
sonalities in  the  light  of  the  years  that  followed 
thirty.  It  is  fascinating  for  youth,  youth  that 
has  passed  childhood  and  not  yet  reached  full 
manhood  or  womanhood,  to  imagine  what  was 
going  on  in  the  mind  and  life  of  Jesus  and  to 
compare  it  as  they  think  it  out  with  what  is 


72  THIS  MIND 

going  on  in  themselves.    I  suspect  that  it  is  more 
possible  for  each  of  us  to  relate  ourselves  to 
him  than  it  would  be  if  we  had  the  details  that 
are  lacking.    We  saw  him  go  into  the  silent  years, 
the  years  that  would  carry  him  through  our  col- 
lege period;  we  heard  him  use  the  words,   "I 
must  be  about  my  Father's  business,"  as  he  passed 
into  the  quiet  and  work  and  growth  at  Nazareth. 
We  see  him  come  out  at  thirty,  making  his  public 
confession  and  consecration  of  himself  in  the  bap- 
tism.   We  see  that  his  face,  a  man's  face  now,  is 
set  in  the  same  direction  that  it  held  when  a  boy ; 
his  clear  eyes  are  looking  the  same  way  they 
did  look;  his  words  sound  almost  as  if  he  had 
begun  with  the  sentence:  ''As  I  was  saying,  I 
must  be  about  my  Father's  business."    And  our 
hearts,  our  eighteen-year-old  hearts,  our  twenty- 
year-old  hearts,   are  thrilled  with   the   feeling, 
the  assurance  that  he  kept  a  straight  path  be- 
tween boyhood's  simple  faith  and  manhood's  full 
consecration;  that  his  feet  did  not  get  tangled 
in  the  tortuous  paths  of  youth  where  so  many  of 
us  lose  the  way;  that  for  him  there  will  be  no 
bitter  years  in  which  he  will  remember  how  he 
forgot  what  he  had  been  and  what  he  was  going 
to  be;  that  he  will  have  nothing  to  undo  or  ex- 
plain; that  he  is  ready  when  the  hour  strikes  to 
go  forward  into  his  life  program.     Blessed  is 
that  youth,  that  college  youth  who  makes  the 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  73 

straight  way  in  this  company  in  this  fashion 
between  the  simple  early  years  and  the  vital  years 
of  the  perfect  labor  to  which  they  go.  Blessed 
also  that  youth  who,  having  got  confused,  sees 
in  the  light  of  Jesus'  face  the  way  back  into  the 
path  that  does  not  need  and  will  never  need  to 
change  direction.  Maybe  we  shall  see  again 
how  direct  is  the  line  for  the  boy  in  the  grades, 
through  high  school  and  college,  and  all  other 
preparation  to  the  objects  of  life.  Maybe  the 
mind  that  was  in  him  in  this  matter  will  be  in 
others.  It  is  the  hope  of  a  new  and  better  world. 
When  one  begins  to  study  the  objects  of  Jesus 
as  they  affected  his  life  decision  and  must  affect 
ours,  if  we  are  to  share  his  life  and  objects,  one 
is  at  once  impressed  with  the  wealth  of  what  he 
proposed  to  do.  A  half  dozen  or  more  capital 
sentences  can  be  found,  all  apparently  on  the 
same  level  of  significance,  all  equally  descriptive 
of  his  mission.  I  preached  my  own  first  little  ser- 
mon more  than  forty  years  ago  from  the  text 
"The  Son  of  man  is  come  to  seek  and  to  save  that 
which  is  lost,"  and  the  subject  of  the  sermon  was 
"The  Mission  of  Jesus.'^  But  that  same  subject 
could  have  been  based  upon  other  texts  just  as 
clearly  as  upon  that  one.  For  example:  "I  am 
come  that  they  might  have  life.''  Or  the  ringing 
declaration  to  Pilate:  "To  this  end  was  I  born, 
and  for  this  purpose  I  came  into  the  world,  to 


74  THIS  MIND 

bear  witness  to  the  truth/'  You  see  that  no  one 
sentence  of  his  fully  covers  what  he  proposed  to 
do.  One  takes  the  first  of  those  sentences  just 
quoted  and  becomes  an  evan<^elist,  another  takes 
the  second  and  becomes  a  general  benefactor,  an- 
other takes  the  third  and  becomes  a  Christian 
teacher.  We  make  a  great  mistake  in  our  ever- 
lasting efforts  to  summarize  everything.  The 
objects  of  the  largest,  most  truly  first-class  lives 
do  not  admit  of  the  nutshell  treatment.  The 
really  abundant  life  does  not  readily  lend  itself 
to  characterization  by  epigram.  Those  persons, 
those  churches,  those  states  which  can  define 
their  whole  object  or  even  their  supreme  object 
in  a  single  sentence  are  not  worth  most  to  the 
world.  They  have  the  keenest  edge,  but  the  keen 
edge  is  a  narrow  edge,  and  life's  highest  quality 
is  neither  keenness  nor  narrowness.  A  creed 
with  a  single  doctrine,  like  a  platform  with  a 
single  plank,  is  very  appealing  to  single-track 
minds,  but  neither  makes  adequate  answer  to 
life's  manifold  needs,  though  they  are  often 
accompanied  by  a  zeal  in  their  behalf  that  is  not 
given  to  richer  creeds  and  better  platforms.  But 
if  there  is  any  one  lesson  in  religious  history, 
it  is  that  "the  whole  stress  of  religion  should 
never  be  laid  upon  one  part  of  it."  The  glorious 
gospel  of  the  blessed  God  is  as  rich  as  the  nature 
of  God  himself  and  ample  for  every  real  neces- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  75 

sity  of  all  human  life.  Let  us,  therefore,  gladly 
abandon  the  effort  to  state  life's  objects  in  an 
epigram  or  rest  their  whole  weight  on  a  single 
sentence. 

I  suspect  that  at  this  point  w^e  meet  a  prin- 
ciple that  is  not  usually  recognized  in  connection 
with  life  decisions.  I  do  not  remember  ever  to 
have  seen  it  discussed  and  I  certainly  have  never 
treated  it  myself  even  through  years  of  speaking 
on  this  subject.  And  I  am  rather  ashamed  to 
have  overlooked  what  really  seems  like  some- 
thing altogether  worth  while  and  what  may  pos- 
sibly be  a  commonplace  to  the  minds  of  other 
men.  The  principle  is  that  there  is  a  real  and 
profound  difference  between  the  decision  for  a 
particular  occupation  and  the  determination  of 
life's  large  objects  which  must  be  worked  out  in 
every  true  occupation.  We  are  disposed  to  be 
satisfied  with  what  is  really  the  minor  decision, 
whereas  the  really  great  concern  lies  far  beyond 
it.  The  particular  calling  or  occupation  is  im- 
portant as  any  instrument  with  which  a  man 
does  his  work  is  important,  but  the  occupation 
is  at  its  best  only  the  agency,  the  means,  the 
instrument  with  which  a  man  carries  out  in  the 
world  the  large  or  small,  the  high  or  low,  the 
good  or  bad,  the  holy  or  unholy  objects  and  pur- 
poses of  his  life.  Everything  depends  upon  what 
those    controlling    purposes    are.      They    reach 


76  THIS  MIND 

through  all  the  activities  and  through  all  the 
years  of  any  man's  life. 

Because  this  matter  is  so  significant  it  will  be 
worth  our  while  to  go  into  it  somewhat  further. 
Let  us  suppose  that  any  student  here  believes 
himself  to  be  called  to  the  ministry,  called  by  all 
those  forces  that  lie  in  every  true  call,  called 
as  certainly  by  God  himself  as  Saint  Paul  was 
called  to  be  an  apostle.  And  let  us  suppose  that 
such  student,  perhajjs  against  his  own  will,  in 
utter  change  of  all  the  plans  he  had  made  and 
prefers,  with  genuine  distrust  of  himself  as  he 
faces  what  he  regards  as  a  calling  far  above 
him,  at  last  obeys  this  call  in  the  spirit  of  obe- 
dience and  consecration  that  links  him  with 
prophet  and  apostle.  He  sees  the  heavenly  vision 
and  will  not  be  disobedient  to  it.  It  makes  the 
heart  beat  fast  to  witness  that  event  in  any 
youth's  life,  especially  if  one  remembers  a  like 
event  in  his  own.  Eeally  it  is  no  wonder  that  it 
makes  such  a  deep  impression  upon  the  youth 
himself  and  upon  his  friends.  It  stands  toward 
his  lifework  as  conversion  does  toward  the  Chris- 
tian life  that  follows.  Going  through  that  won- 
derful gate  of  call  or  conversion  is  so  glorious 
an  experience  that  it  often  seems  to  be  the  climax 
and  high  point  both  of  ministry  and  Christian 
life.  Men  go  on  through  life  telling  the  story 
of  their  "call"  or  their  conversion,  ever  telling 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  TT 

it  as  their  experience.  They  repeat  all  the  stir- 
ring details,  the  time,  the  place,  the  conditions. 
They  go  through  the  gate  over  and  over  again, 
or  warm  themselves  year  after  year  in  the  fire 
through  which  they  came  into  ministry  or  Chris- 
tian life.  Dramatically  converted  men  go 
through  life  telling  the  dramatic  story  of  their 
conversion,  often  as  though  this  which  should 
be  the  beginning  of  a  Christian  life  were  the 
whole  of  it.  And  dramatically  called  preachers 
never  weary  themselves  reciting  the  thrilling 
story  of  their  call,  a  call  which  grows  in  the  tell- 
ing as  good  stories  always  do,  as  though  the  call 
to  the  ministry  constituted  the  ministry  itself. 
All  this  has  been  both  a  strength  and  a  weakness 
in  the  lives  of  many  in  our  own  and  other 
churches,  a  strength  in  the  clearness  and  power 
of  conversion  and  call,  a  weakness  in  the  ever- 
lasting failure  to  place  that  experience  as  only 
the  entrance  to  an  ever-enriching  life  and  an  ever- 
deepening  service  in  the  ministry.  For,  after  all 
is  said,  the  real  question  for  any  best  youth  is 
not  whether  he  is  called  to  the  ministry  or 
whether  he  obeys  that  call ;  the  real  question  is 
what  he  proposes  to  do,  to  live  for,  to  labor  for^ 
to  die  for  in  that  ministry.  What  does  he  set 
before  him  as  its  objects  through  the  years  of  his 
youth,  his  manhood,  and  his  age?  What  are  the 
objects  which  he  must  win  or  fail,  which  he  must 


78  THIS  MIND 

try  to  achieve  or  die?  What  rich,  living  truth 
will  he  use  and  use  to  set  men  free?  What  will 
he  do  to  recover  lost  sheep  or  recall  lost  sons? 
What  Christlike  ministry  of  consolation  will  he 
show  toward  the  world  of  awful  sorrow  that 
breaks  the  hearts  of  men?  What  steadying,  guid- 
ing, encouraging,  inspiring  relation  will  he  sus- 
tain to  childhood  and  youth  even  in  its  trying 
years?  What  course  will  he  take  through  the 
tangled  moral  evils  of  the  town  he  lives  in,  and 
the  world  of  his  day?  In  a  word,  again,  what 
will  be  the  objects  of  his  ministry — the  objects 
that  lift  him  in  his  youth,  that  call  him  like  a 
trumpet  in  the  heat  of  life's  noon,  that  make  his 
sky  to  shine  as  he  goes  toward  life's  evening? 
What  are  the  objects  that  he  will  set  before  him 
as  that  other  Minister  did,  with  such  clearness 
that  he  can  endure  the  cross,  the  cross  of  all  the 
things  a  town  can  do  to  him,  and  despise  the 
shame,  the  shame  of  poverty  and  opposition  and 
even  defeat,  as  long  as  his  objects  are  like  his 
Master's?  Do  you  see?  The  objects  justify  the 
call,  the  objects  sanctify  the  decision.  Really 
nothing  else  does. 

I  pass  by  missions  and  teaching  and  medicine 
because,  in  a  sense,  they  are  easy.  The  relation 
between  the  decision  to  enter  any  of  them,  and 
the  objects  that  fairly  inhere  in  each  of  them,  any 
one  can  see.     Let  us  assume  that  this  is  clear, 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  79 

and  go  on  to  consider  two  or  three  other  callings 
which  are  not  thought  to  be  so  easy,  which  are 
not  thought  or  spoken  of  as  '^callings"  at  all.  And 
yet  many  of  you  will  go  into  one  or  the  other 
of  them.  Must  you  in  so  doing  leave  all  conse- 
cration behind?  Must  you  in  so  doing  separate 
yourself  in  spirit  from  your  fellow  student  who 
heads  toward  ministry  or  missionary  service? 
Must  you  turn  your  back  upon  the  gleam  which 
they  follow?  Must  you  be  disobedient  to  the  vi- 
sion which  they  obey  ?  Worst  of  all,  must  you  miss 
the  companionship  which  they  have?  Are  you 
barred  from  saying,  ^'Master,  I  will  go  along 
with  you  wherever  you  go"?  Does  the  life 
journey  with  him  lead  only  to  the  pulpit  or  the 
foreign  field?  The  scribe  said  he  would  go  with 
the  Master.  Was  the  rich  young  ruler  prevented 
by  anything  except  his  selfishness  from  saying  it 
with  equal  loyalty? 

Let  us  look,  then,  at  what  we  call  business. 
Let  that  term  have  its  largest  meaning.  Let  it 
include  all  that  great  big  enterprise  that  engages 
and  occupies  such  multitudes  of  great  big  men; 
that  enterprise  that  runs  into  economics,  com- 
merce, industry,  comfort,  welfare,  and  activity 
that  make  up  such  a  tremendous  portion  of  the 
life  of  the  w^orld.  Many  of  you  will  make  your 
life  decision  for  business.  We  need  not  try  to 
conceal  that  fact  from  ourselves.     Must  we  say 


80  THIS  MIND 

to  all  those  who  do  make  that  decision  that  they 
can  have  no  fellowship  with  the  Great  Compan- 
ion in  their  occupation?  Has  the  door  to  busi- 
ness written  over  it  those  utterly  despairing 
words,  "All  hope  abandon,  ye  who  enter  here''? 
Must  one  facing  that  way  face  entirely  away 
from  all  spiritual  ideals,  all  those  principles 
that  we  have  been  considering,  those  principles 
that  seemed  necessary  if  we  would  save  our 
souls?  Or  does  our  distinction  between  life  deci- 
sions and  life  objects  come  to  our  relief  at  this 
point?    Let  us  see. 

We  need  be  under  no  illusions  as  to  the  spirit 
of  business,  take  it  by  and  large.  Neither  big 
business  nor  small  business  is  conducted  with 
primary  reference  to  the  law  of  love.  We  need 
not  charge  it  with  dishonesty  at  all,  but  we  do 
it  no  injustice  in  declaring  that  the  governing 
law,  the  ruling  principle  of  trade  in  all  its  forms 
is  the  law  of  gain  and  the  principle  of  profits. 
The  fruit  of  the  spirit  of  modern  business  is 
assuredly  not  "love,  joy,  peace,  patience,  kind- 
ness, benevolence,  good  faith,  meekness,  self- 
restraint."  The  business  world,  the  men  of  busi- 
ness themselves  being  the  judges,  is  not  a  friend 
of  grace,  to  help  anyone  on  to  God.  The  spirit  of 
business  is  not  the  spirit  of  Christ  as  business 
goes  on  in  the  present  age.  It  never  has  been 
in  any  age.    No  one  can  read  the  Gospels  with- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  81 

out  feeling  his  own  intense  anxiety  for  people 
who  get  involved  in  the  struggle  for  wealth,  or 
even  the  absorption  in  material  things  at  all. 
Words  that  would  be  denounced  as  extreme  if 
spoken  by  any  country  pastor  were  spoken  over 
and  over  again  by  him,  seriously,  thoughtfully, 
faithfully.  He  does  not  say  that  men  in  business 
cannot  be  good  men,  but  he  evidently  thinks  that 
special  grace  is  needed  for  all  such  men. 

And  I  think  you  will  find  all  too  many  men 
who  think  they  cannot  succeed  in  the  various 
kinds  of  business  if  they  apply  the  principles  of 
Jesus  to  their  business  and  who  fix  up  some  sort 
of  compromise  that  will  enable  them  to  do  as  well 
as  they  can.  They  want  to  be  Christians,  they 
do  not  want  to  be  cranks,  so  they  become  worldly- 
wise  and  avoid  being  righteous  overmuch.  Also 
you  will  hear  a  lot  of  men  announcing  their  life 
decisions  with  business  in  view  of  these  words : 
"God  w^ants  some  men  to  make  money  for  him, 
and  I  think  I  can  be  one  of  them."  For  forty 
years  and  more  I  have  been  hearing  college  men 
say  that,  and  have  been  watching  the  outcome  of 
it  in  scores  and  hundreds  of  lives.  It  is  not  a 
very  encouraging  experience.  In  the  long  run 
the  emphasis  has  mostly  shifted,  and  men  have 
made  "money"  in  capitals,  "for  God"  in  small 
type.  They  get  the  bulk  of  the  money  they  make, 
leaving  for  God  only  diminishing  returns.    Some- 


82  THIS  MIND 

times  they  drug  their  souls  by  quoting  Jacob 
and  talking  of  the  tithe  that  is  the  Lord's,  as  if 
the  rest,  the  most,  belonged  to  them.  Probably 
the  worst  bookkeeping  in  the  world  is  the  book- 
keeping with  God  on  the  part  of  men  who  set 
out  to  make  money  for  him.  I  am  not  mincing 
words  or  putting  this  on  an  easy  basis  for  you. 
You  will  go  into  business,  lots  of  you,  and  I  am 
trying  to  tell  you  how  the  Master  looks  on  what 
it  involves,  knowing  full  well  that  when  the  com- 
mercial spirit  gets  controlling  hold  of  any  man 
in  ministry  or  anywhere  else  it  ruins  him  in  the 
soul  of  him. 

Is  the  case  then  absolutely  hopeless,  as  it  looks 
to  be?  I  do  not  think  so.  I  cannot  let  the  vast 
majority  of  men  go  into  an  occupation  without 
trying  to  show  them  how  they  can  do  it  and 
yet  keep  step  with  the  Master  of  all  life.  We 
must  have  recourse  here  to  the  deep  distinction 
between  our  occupations  and  our  objects.  If 
the  object  is  to  make  money,  the  man  is  gone. 
If  the  object  is  simply  to  make  an  ever  better 
living,  better  as  judged  merely  by  physical  and 
un-Christlike  tests,  then  the  man  is  gone.  If 
the  object  works  out  so  that  God  always  gets  the 
small  end,  then  the  thing  is  wrong.  But  if  in 
the  everlasting  struggle  between  the  spirit  of 
the  age  and  the  spirit  of  the  Master  the  latter 
always  w^ins;  if  God  does  always  get  the  long 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  8^ 

end  both  of  the  life  and  its  outcome ;  if  this  stand- 
ard counts  for  more  and  more  and  the  stand- 
ards of  the  world  for  less  and  less ;  if  the  objects 
of  Christ  control  with  ever-growing  power  your 
own  objects ;  if  mammon  is  ever  your  servant  and 
Christ  ever  your  Master;  if  you  grow  ever  more 
certain  that  it  is  far  easier  to  make  your  way 
against  a  crooked  generation  than  it  is  to  mock 
or  deceive  a  perfectly  straightforward  God,  thea 
you  can  go  into  business  with  hope,  courage,  and 
a  high  heart.  Only  you  must  resolve  to  do  it 
this  way  even  though  you  are  the  only  one.  In 
this  you  cannot  condition  what  you  do  upon! 
whether  others  will  do  it  this  way.  That  would 
be  easy.  But  you  must  do  it  this  way  even  if 
no  man  stands  with  you.  For  then,  and  then  only, 
will  Jesus  Christ  stand  by  you.  If  you  go  into 
business  as  a  vocation  you  must  go  in  with  the 
mind  that  was  in  him  toward  the  objects  of  your 
business  life.  The  one  tragic  overwhelming 
failure  and  bankruptcy  in  that  calling  is  the 
failure  to  have  his  mind,  and  the  bankruptcy 
which  follows.  For  that  bankruptcy  is  moral 
and  personal.  If  it  is  impossible  to  do  business 
successfully  on  Christ's  principles,  it  is  even 
more  impossible  to  live  successfully  on  any  other 
principles  than  his. 

Or  take  the  editorial  calling.     Many  of  you 
look  ahead  to  some  sort  of  relation  to  the  periodi- 


84  THIS  MIND 

cal  press.  Some  hope  to  write  for  magazines  or 
to  edit  one  of  them.  Some  plan  to  be  correspond- 
ents, reporters,  and  finally  editors  of  daily  news- 
papers. Hardly  any  occupation  open  to  Christian 
scholars  offers  finer  opportunity  for  Christian 
service  than  the  occupation  of  a  Christian  writer. 
Never  did  the  printed  page,  especially  the  daily 
or  magazine  page,  reach  so  far.  Never  was  it 
more  important  to  have  journalism  in  all  its 
reaches  and  ranges  sanctified  by  consecration 
and  purpose,  made  in  the  deepest  sense  a  calling 
rather  than  a  profession  or  occupation.  And  it 
has  never  been  harder  than  it  will  be  in  your 
lifetime,  the  time  when  you  are  working  out  your 
life  decisions  in  life  service,  to  make  a  calling  of 
it.  Journalism  of  all  sorts  has  been  incrusted,  as 
other  professions  have  been,  by  the  spirit  of  com- 
mercialism and  conformity.  Men  write  what  will 
sell,  what  editors  and  readers  will  buy.  Men 
print  what  they  think  the  public  w^ants.  Or 
journalism  reflects  and  photographs  life  and  thus 
creates  more  of  the  thing  it  portrays.  It  is  repor- 
torial  rather  than  creative  and  constructive. 
Here,  then,  is  an  opportunity  which  can  only  be 
hinted  at,  not  described  in  these  brief  limits. 
Some  of  you  have  been  called  by  journalism. 
You  cannot  fulfill  your  calling  by  taking  your 
keynote  from  the  counting  room,  the  party  plat- 
form, or  the  sentiment  round  about  you.     You 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  85 

cannot  be  a  minister  of  Christ  in  that  high  call- 
ing unless  you  bring  the  mind  of  Christ  to  that 
calling.  It  was  important  beyond  words  that  the 
writers  of  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  should 
have  been  moved,  guided,  helped  by  the  Holy 
Spirit.  They  had  such  inspiration  for  their  writ- 
ing as  they  needed  to  interpret  the  mind,  the 
purpose,  the  ways  and  the  love  of  God  to  the 
world.  What  they  wrote  remains  the  world's 
most  precious  and  useful  literature.  I  have  more 
than  once  tried  to  prove  that  they  were  truly 
inspired  by  the  Holy  Spirit.  I  have  been  deeply 
interested  in  the  inspiration  of  the  prophets, 
evangelists,  and  apostles.  But  to-day  I  am  also 
greatly  concerned  about  what  Henry  Drummond 
called  ^'the  contemporary  activities  of  the  Holy 
Spirit"  among  modern  men  and  women  who 
write.  Will  you,  facing  that  career,  face  it  in 
this  light?  Will  you  set  before  yourself  a  crea- 
tive, constructive  journalistic  ideal  and  life,  or 
will  you  simply  content  yourself  with  being  a 
reflector,  photographer  or  reporter  of  the  life 
about  you?  Your  answer  will  determine  whether 
journalism  is  to  be  an  occupation  or  a  calling 
in  your  hands.  What  has  been  done  by  such 
inspired  Scripture  or  writing  as  we  have  leads 
me  to  long  that  a  whole  generation  of  writing 
men  and  women  may  write  what  may  in  our 
modern  life  be  profitable  for  teaching,  "for  re- 


86  THIS  MIND 

proof,  for  correction,  for  instruction  in  righteous- 
ness.'' On  this  basis  journalism  will  come  back 
to  its  own  and  to  its  throne,  and  journalists  will 
take  their  place  as  the  called  of  God  for  a  service 
no  one  else  can  perform. 

One  other  occupation  that  is  regarded  as  diffi- 
cult when  a  Christian  student  is  making  his  life 
decision  is  the  profession  of  a  lawyer.  After  an 
address  to  the  Student  Conference  at  Lake 
Geneva  last  summer,  one  of  the  best  of  the  men 
on  the  grounds  expressed  real  regret  that  no 
word  had  been  said  by  me  to  help  the  sincere, 
earnest  men  who  were  there  looking  toward  law 
as  a  lifework.  He  pointed  out  that  they  are 
earnest  men,  men  who  want  to  serve  Christ  in 
their  lives,  men  who  want  to  do  it  in  the  legal  pro- 
fession, but  are  partly  made  to  feel  that  in  that 
profession  they  cannot.  After  what  he  said  I 
too  regretted  my  omissions,  though  that  is  more 
common  with  me  than  with  my  audiences. 

I  need  not  raise  again  the  questions  that  were 
raised  in  introducing  the  paragraphs  on  business 
as  a  calling,  though  many  of  them  and  many 
more  would  apply  here.  They  are  taken  for 
granted  as  confronting  us  now  as  they  did  then. 
And  in  addition  there  are  some  rather  discourag- 
ing words  about  lawyers  in  a  very  significant 
place.  In  the  New  Testament  the  lawyer  does 
not  appear  to  very  good  advantage.    And  in  the 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  87 

common  opinion  of  the  profession  itself  and  that 
of  the  world  concerning  the  profession  it  is  not 
regarded  as  one  of  the  eminently  Christian  pro- 
fessions as  such,  though  mam^  eminent  Chris- 
tians adorn  and  honor  the  profession  by  their 
membership  in  it.  The  real  question,  however, 
is  not  whether  a  man  can  be  a  successful  lawyer 
and  still  be  a  Christian.  That  question  is 
answered  by  the  lives  and  characters  of  many 
men  who  have  shown  that  this  can  be  done.  The 
real  question  for  men  at  the  age  when  they  are 
seriously  making  their  life  decisions  is  whether 
they  can  make  their  decision  with  the  consecra- 
tion that  marks  the  Master  and  on  the  principles 
upon  which  he  based  his  own  life.  They  want 
to  become  lawyers,  and  they  do  not  want  to 
break  with  Jesus.  (Of  course,  this  applies  to 
those  to  whom  it  applies,  and  not  at  all  to  those 
who  do  not  care  for  him,  who  make  all  their 
plans  without  reference  to  him.)  Can  they  make 
this  decision  at  the  altar,  or  w^hen  they  are 
remembering  Jesus  Christ  in  the  holy  commun- 
ion, or  w^hen  they  are  looking  him  in  the  face, 
or  facing  a  lifetime  which  may  be  spent  with  or 
without  him?  Of  course,  if  they  cannot,  then 
there  is  but  one  thing  to  dp.  They  must  turn 
their  backs  upon  the  profession  they  desire  for 
the  sake  of  their  loyalty  to  the  Master  whom  they 
adore. 


88  THIS  MIND 

But  here  I  think  we  must  have  recourse  to 
three  considerations.  First:  The  law  is  not  all 
on  the  same  level.  There  are  kinds  of  lawyers 
that  no  decent,  earnest  man  can  be.  There  are 
low  conceptions  of  the  profession  and  low  prac- 
tices in  it  which  cannot  be  chosen  by  any  youth 
who  looks  ahead  to  a  noble  life.  On  the  other 
hand,  there  are  lofty,  holy  ideals  of  the  profes- 
sion sacredly  held  and  honored  by  sincere  men, 
who  in  their  calling  and  by  their  calling  preserve 
their  own  integrity  unsullied,  like  the  spotless 
ermine,  and  through  the  years  hold  society  to 
obedience  to  law,  to  respect  for  truth  and  confi- 
dence in  justice.  Men  of  this  sort  stand  before 
the  youth  of  every  college  as  examples  of  the 
better  way. 

Second:  The  distinction  between  life's  deci- 
sions and  life's  objects  holds  here,  holds  here 
perhaps  in  a  special  measure.  The  deeper  ques- 
tion of  one's  final  purpose  must  be  answered. 
Does  that  purpose  walk  in  even  step  with  the 
purpose  of  the  good  and  great  of  all  the  ages? 
Does  it  go  steadily,  unswervingly,  at  any  cost 
toward  making  on  this  earth,  among  men  and 
nations  a  true  republic  or  kingdom  of  law,  of 
justice,  of  righteousness,  of  truth  and  fairness 
between  men,  of  freedom  from  oppression  and 
legalized  wrong,  of  security  for  the  weak,  the 
safety  of  society  and  the  only  liberty  there  is, 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  89 

liberty  under  law?  If  the  decision  to  go  into 
law  cannot  bear  these  tests  as  to  its  objects,  it 
cannot  be  made  in  Christ's  name.  And  that  is 
final.  No  man  can  deliberately  head  toward  the 
low,  mean  practices  of  the  law  and  do  it  in 
Christ's  name  or  on  his  abiding  principles. 

Third :  I  am  including  in  the  words  ''law  as  a 
profession"  all  that  large  and  valuable  public 
service  which  really  can  only  be  fully  and  per- 
fectly performed  by  the  aid  of  men  of  legal 
training.  And  I  declare  my  conviction  that  men 
wdth  the  right  legal  training  and  the  right  spirit 
with  it,  men  who  are  not  slaves  to  legal  petti- 
ness and  technical  formalities,  men  who  share 
Christ's  objects  in  the  world  and  have  his  devo- 
tion to  those  objects,  have  an  opportunity  for 
Christian  service  to-day  that  such  men  have  not 
had  in  any  Christian  century.  They  have  the 
chance  to  redeem  the  profession  from  the  work 
and  reputation  of  their  forebears  in  the  New 
Testament.  In  that  day  a  certain  lawyer  tried 
to  trap  Jesus  Christ  and  to  puzzle  him  by  ques- 
tions. In  this  day  the  right  sort  of  lawyer  has 
a  glorious  chance  to  help  Jesus  Christ  make 
straight  the  legal  paths  in  which  men  and  nations 
can  walk,  as  they  go  not  toward  a  League  of 
Nations,  but  toward  the  Kingdom  which  is  love, 
joy,  and  truth,  the  Kingdom  of  holiness  on  this 
poor  old  earth  of  ours.    If  you  are  going  in  like 


90  THIS  MIND 

this,  with  this  object  governing  and  controlling 
you,  you  may  look  just  ahead  or  just  at  your 
side  for  the  figure  with  the  seamless  robe  and 
sandaled  feet.  And  if  you  see  him,  strike  step 
with  him  and  go  on. 

One  day  a  group  of  bishops  called  upon  the 
President  of  the  United  States,  as  their  prede- 
cessors had  done  for  more  than  a  century,  to 
assure  the  President  of  their  loyalty  to  him  and 
prayers  for  him.  One  of  them — now  in  the  skies 
— read  a  brief  address  in  which  he  referred  to 
himself  and  his  colleagues  as  ministers  of  reli- 
gion ordained  to  establish  righteousness,  peace, 
and  goodness  among  men.  He  had  barely  fin- 
ished when  the  President,  with  eyes  gleaming 
behind  his  glasses,  teeth  flashing  in  the  light 
that  shone  into  his  face,  with  high,  cracking  voice 
almost  furiously  said:  "I  also  am  a  minister  of 
religion.  I  too  have  taken  the  vows  of  a  holy 
service  in  the  world.  I  also  have  been  ordained 
to  establish  righteousness  and  truth,  and  to- make 
a  better  world  for  humanity.  God  help  me.  I 
will  keep  my  vow  and  fulfill  my  ministry  among 
men." 

One  other  day,  not  long  ago,  one  of  those  same 
bishops  sat  in  the  gallery  of  a  noble  building  in 
the  nation's  capital  and  saw  the  Secretary  of 
State  surrounded  by  men  of  the  great  nations 
working  on  the  problem  of  a  world  without  war, 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  91 

working  with  all  their  human  skill,  all  their  legal 
training,  and  that  Secretary  at  least  with  all  his 
Christian  consecration.  And  as  that  bishop 
watched  those  men  and  thought  of  the  world 
meaning  of  their  task,  thought  of  the  Master's 
interest  in  what  they  were  doing,  the  ordaining 
mood  came  upon  him  as  at  an  Annual  Confer- 
ence when  men  are  set  apart  for  the  ministry. 
He  wanted  to  lay  hands  upon  the  heads  of  them 
and  say :  '^The  Lord  pour  upon  thee  the  Holy 
Spirit  for  the  office  and  work  of  an  international 
statesman  now  committed  unto  thee  by  the 
authority  of  Christ.  And  be  thou  a  faithful  dis- 
penser of  the  truth  of  God  and  the  ordinances 
of  peace  and  righteousness  in  the  name  of  the 
Father  and  of  the  Son  and  of  the  Holy  Spirit." 

Are  you  prepared  to  be  ordained  to  such 
objects  as  you  make  your  life  decision,  with  the 
law  as  your  choice?  If  you  are,  go  ahead.  If 
not,  do  not  go  any  farther  that  way. 

Finally,  the  objects  of  a  man's  life  must  be  seen 
in  the  light  of  three  or  four  steady  flames. 
Already  we  have  seen  that  the  purposes  of  a 
rich,  full  life  are  too  large  to  be  stated  in  a 
single  sentence  or  seen  in  a  single  act.  Skeleton 
keys  do  not  work  in  this  kind  of  personality. 
You  see  what  a  man  is  going  to  be,  or  when  his 
life  is  fully  under  way  you  see  what  his  objects 
are,  or  when  it  is  over  you  get  the  full  picture 


92  THIS  MIND 

of  what  it  was,  not  in  the  light  of  one  verbal 
flash,  however  brilliant.  If  it  is  really  w^orth 
understanding,  it  must  be  studied  in  its  total  im- 
pression, the  impression  inevitably  made  by  four 
or  five  features.  For  example,  attention  has 
already  been  called  to  three  or  four  sentences, 
each  one  sounding  like  a  statement  of  the  mission 
of  Jesus.  As  between  those  sentences  taken  by 
themselves,  apart  from  everything  else,  one  might 
readily  get  confused  as  to  the  real  object  of  the 
Master.  You  have  to  unite  them,  relate  them  to 
one  another,  and  to  all  the  rest  of  his  sayings  in 
order  to  get  their  full  meaning.  And,  indeed, 
that  just  about  says  what  I  am  trying  to  say. 
You  get  your  final,  complete  knowledge  of  any 
real  man's  objects  from  his  total  output  of  seri- 
ous utterance,  from  first  to  last.  The  impression 
of  Jesus'  objects  is  not  so  clear  and  sharp  as  if  he 
had  said  just  one  specific,  single  thing.  Small 
minds  will  not  get  so  much  out  of  it,  so  much 
that  is  handy  for  debate  or  for  use  as  shibboleths ; 
it  will  not  be  so  easy  to  get  a  catchy  sentence 
upon  which  to  build  a  catchy  career  or  a  petty 
denomination,  as  if  they  could  seize  a  single 
sentence  and  ignore  all  the  rest.  But  you  men 
and  women  ought  to  thank  your  God  that  you  can 
escape  this  narrowing,  dwarfing  conception,  and 
see  the  objects  of  Jesus  in  the  sum  total  of  what 
he  said.    It  is  not  so  sharp  and  definite,  not  so 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  93 

mathematically  precise,  but  it  has  a  personal 
wealth  and  fullness,  a  glory  of  abundance  and  a 
splendor  of  universality  and  an  appeal  to  the 
largest  life  in  it  that  make  two  things  forever 
sure.  These  words,  these  total  words,  are  spirit 
and  life.  And  these  words  shall  not  pass  away. 
They  will,  as  Dean  Stanley  said,  pass  into  litera- 
ture and  into  life,  but  they  will  not  pass  away. 

You  get  the  same  impression  in  the  same  way 
by  a  study  of  what  he  did.  He  never  created  the 
impression  that  what  he  was  saying  or  doing  at 
any  given  moment  was  unimportant  and  might 
be  ignored.  And  he  never  created  the  impression 
that  the  individual  thing  was  the  only  thing 
he  was  interested  in.  Yet  here,  again,  superficial 
minds  can  easily  mislead  themselves  by  the  par- 
tial view  and  lay  the  whole  stress  of  his  activity 
upon  a  single  act.  And  if  you  press  that  far 
enough,  you  can  base  your  own  mission  upon 
washing  men's  feet,  or  walking  on  the  water,  or 
riding  on  a  young  donkey,  or  cursing  barren  fig 
trees,  or  driving  evil  spirits  into  pigs.  Every  one 
of  these  things  Jesus  did.  But  any  man  would 
be  a  foolish  man  who  should  seize  any  one  of 
them  or  any  other  single  act  of  his  life  as  though 
it  fully  expressed  the  object  of  his  life.  Here, 
as  in  the  case  of  his  utterance,  you  have  to  inter- 
pret the  objects  of  his  life  by  the  grand  total  of 
his  activity,  the  full  output  of  his  deeds.    What 


94  THIS  MIND 

he  did  through  his  whole  wonderful  life — the 
miracles  he  performed,  the  common  good  he  went 
about  doing,  the  countless  deeds  of  mercy,  kind- 
ness, usefulness,  and  righteousness,  recorded 
only  in  part — shows  what  he  meant  to  do,  w^hat 
the  objects  of  his  life  were.  There  are  words  of 
his  that  you  can  hardly  read  if  you  think  of 
them  in  this  light.  In  the  very  greatest  night  of 
history  you  hear  him  saying  to  his  Father  these 
two  sentences :  "The  truths  which  thou  didst 
teach  me,  I  have  taught  them."  "I  have  done 
perfectly  the  work  thou  didst  give  me  to  do." 
In  speech  and  deed,  in  total  speech  and  total 
deed,  he  revealed  and  worked  out  the  objects  of 
his  life. 

Mr.  Gladstone  had  religion  as  the  very  basis 
of  his  life.  He  wanted  to  enter  the  ministry. 
He  did  go  to  Parliament.  But  the  mere  choice  of 
a  profession  could  make  no  difference  in  the 
ground  tone  of  his  thought  and  life  (Russell, 
Life  of  Gladstone). 

You  see  it  also  in  Jesus'  total  plan  for  all  the 
large  variety  of  people  that  he  touched,  labored 
for,  worked  Avith  and  worked  upon.  This  rela- 
tion to  people  as  bearing  upon  life's  decisions 
and  revealing  life's  objects  is  so  full  of  meaning 
that  it  must  be  made  the  subject  of  an  entire 
study  before  we  have  done.  At  the  risk  of  antici- 
pating now  and  repeating  later,  let  me  say  that 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  95 

here  again  the  test  does  not  lie  in  what  he  did  or 
proposed  to  do  with  one  person  any  more  than 
it  did  in  one  truth  or  one  deed.  His  relation  to 
Peter  was  not  the  only  relation  he  sustained  any 
more  than  the  new  birth  was  the  only  truth  he 
taught  or  healing  lepers  the  only  thing  he  did. 
In  making  his  life  decision  and  in  making  yours, 
the  total  relation  to  humanity  is  the  vital  thing. 
The  object  of  life  is  tested  by  what  one  proposes 
to  do  through  his  whole  life  for  mankind  as  a 
whole.    All  personal  life  must  get  its  benefit. 

The  object  of  life  as  affecting  and  illuminating 
life  decisions  can  be  seen  also  in  what  one  earn- 
estly, steadily,  and  passionately  prays  for. 
Hardly  anything  more  clearly  reveals  a  man's 
real  purposes  than  the  temper  and  tone  of  his 
prayers.  It  is  amazing  to  observe  that  uncon- 
sciously, perhaps  unintentionally,  prayers  are 
usually  selfish.  You  can  pretty  nearly  tell  what 
a  person  is  or  is  going  to  be  by  hearing,  particu- 
larly by  overhearing,  what  he  most  earnestly  asks 
God  to  do.  For  real  prayer  is  much  more  than 
simply  a  pious  wish  piously  uttered.  At  its  best 
it  is  a  man's  highest  and  deepest  desire  laid  down 
before  the  Almighty,  all-wise,  all-understanding 
God.  It  is  a  real  desire  put  up  to  the  Person  who 
may  grant  it  or  bring  it  to  pass.  I  doubt  if  any 
more  critically  important  words  were  ever 
spoken  to  men  than  these :  "Ask  what  you  will.'^ 


9C  THIS  MIND 

If  you  had  one  wish,  one  wish  for  all  the  world 
to  know,  one  wish  for  God  to  grant,  not  a  secret 
wish  known  only  to  your  own  soul,  not  a  wish 
to  end  in  being  wished,  but  one  wish  as  the  full 
desire  of  your  life,  one  wish  to  be  realized  in  the 
world,  one  wish  to  have  your  name  attached  to 
through  the  centuries,  what  would  it  be?  Do 
not  answer  in  a  hurry.  Do  not  be  superficial  and 
trifling  about  it.  Keep  steady  while  you  look  it 
over  and  look  it  through.  This  is  not  an  imagi- 
nary or  hypothetical  suggestion.  You  have  one 
such  wish.  Whatever  it  is  determines  the  real 
object  of  your  life  and  the  real  meaning  of  your 
life  decision.  He  had  such  a  wish.  You  have  it. 
It  takes  many  forms  and  reaches  into  many 
areas,  but  the  thing  you  genuinely  ask  God  for 
is  the  thing  that  in  the  long  run  you  want  done 
in  your  life. 

Of  course  all  this  finds  chief  expression  in 
what  a  man  lives  for  and,  if  he  has  the  oppor- 
tunity, dies  for.  The  objects  of  his  life,  the 
objects  which  govern  his  life  decisions,  really 
determine  all  the  ends  he  aims  at.  For  them  he 
spends  his  days  and  nights.  For  them  he  toils 
and  suffers  and  sacrifices.  For  them  at  last  he 
cheerfully  lays  life  down  and  counts  the  end 
worth  the  price.  And  it  is  good  that  in  the  world 
where  you  are  to  spend  your  years  there  are  so 
many  things  worth  living  for  and  worth  dying 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  OBJECTS  97 

for.  Not  everything  that  men  do  will  bear  so 
much  weight  as  the  w^eight  of  a  life  and  a  death. 
A  lot  of  things  are  not  worth  any  such  price,  but 
if  you  have  come  thus  far  on  the  principles  we 
have  had  before  us,  and  especially  in  the  company 
of  that  other  Person,  you  will  not  care  for  those 
unworthy  things  now.  He  is  worthy ;  the  objects 
of  his  life  and  death  justify  w^hat  he  gave  for 
them.  There  is  a  glorious  chance  to  complete 
his  work,  even  to  make  up  what  w^as  lacking  in 
his  sufferings.  He  is  still  in  it  as  in  the  days 
long  gone.  I  know  nothing  better  for  you  men 
and  women  than  to  get  into  it  with  him  for  life 
or  for  death. 


IV 


THIS  MIND  TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF 
LIFE 

It  surely  is  not  necessary  to  say  again  that  a 
life  decision  is  only  the  beginning  of  a  lifework. 
David  Livingstone  used  to  say,  ^'The  end  of  the 
exploration  is  the  beginning  of  the  enterprise/' 
which  we  may  paraphrase  to  read,  ^'The  end  of 
the  decision  is  the  beginning  of  everything." 
You  make  the  decision  some  day  in  a  swift,  vital 
hour,  but  you  do  not  have  it  over  with  in  an  hour. 
The  years  pack  themselves  into  the  moments  and 
the  years  make  the  moments  immortal. 

"Heard  are  the  voices, 
Heard  are  the  sages, 
The  worlds  and  the  ages. 
Choose  well ;  your  choice  is 
Brief  and  vet  endless." 


Because  of  the  long  reach  of  a  life  decision,  be- 
cause it  must  be  tested  by  the  logic  and  expe- 
rience of  the  years  rather  than  the  logic  and 
emotion  of  the  hours,  it  is  necessary  at  this 
point  to  utter  two  serious  cautions.  First,  do 
not  go  into  a  calling  for  life  that  will  wear  out 

98 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE       99 

in  a  few  years.  Your  calling  ought  to  last  your 
lifetime.  It  is  a  pitiful  thing  to  grow  tired  of 
your  vocation  while  the  day  is  yet  young,  to 
"catch  up  with  your  horizon"  before  you  have 
reached  the  middle  of  your  journey.  Second, 
do  not  go  into  a  great  calling  on  a  small  motive, 
or  a  narrow  basis.  Especially  do  not,  for  small 
reasons,  just  drift  into  any  high  occupation  for 
the  purpose  of  trying  it  to  see  how  you  will  like 
it.  Men  who  try  the  ministry  to  see  whether  they 
will  like  it  usually  end  by  trying  the  churches 
more  sorely.  Men  who  try  teaching  or  medicine 
or  law  saying:  "If  I  do  not  like  it,  I  will  try 
something  else,"  are  trials  themselves  from  the 
start.  They  are  off  the  center.  Making  life  deci- 
sions on  the  basis  of  personal  liking  or  disliking 
is  one  of  the  worst  sorts  of  egotism.  Life  deci- 
sions should  never  be  made  on  an  egocentric 
basis. 

Life  decisions  should  be  made  on  such  prin- 
ciples and  for  such  reasons  as  will  secure  a  sense 
of  strength  and  steadiness,  as  will  take  the  fret 
and  uncertainty  out  of  a  man.  He  need  not 
have  the  sense  of  personal  strength — that  would 
be  vanity.  He  must  have  the  sense  of  strength 
of  calling — that  is  power.  You  may  well  be 
modest  and  distrustful  of  yourself,  but  restless- 
ness in  and  doubt  of  your  calling  are  utterly  de- 
structive of  power  in  it.     You  may,  like  Saint 


100  THIS  MIND 

Paul,  feel  that  you  have  your  treasure  in  an 
earthly  vessel,  but  being  in  this  service,  and 
mindful  of  the  mercy  shown  you  in  putting  you 
in,  you  must  not  be  a  coward  and  you  must  ^'not 
lose  heart  in  it.''  And  as  you  draw  near  the  end 
of  a  life  on  this  level,  even  though  you  may  be 
battered  and  wounded,  showing  loss  of  limb  and 
many  signs  of  battle,  you  will  cry  out  with 
Roosevelt  the  strenuous,  ''It  has  been  a  bully 
fight,"  or  with  Saint  Paul  the  aged,  in  language 
more  dignified  but  in  the  same  spirit:  ''I  have 
fought  in  a  good  fight.  I  have  gone  through  the 
glorious  contest." 

Our  duty  to-day,  in  addition  to  all  that  has 
gone  before,  is  to  find  or  lay  the  foundation  for 
such  strength  and  steadiness,  something  that 
will  throw 

''God's  greatness  round  onr  incompleteness, 
Eound  our  restlessness  his  rest." 

1.  In  order  to  have  a  permanent  and  sustain- 
ing sense  of  strength  in  what  you  are  doing,  you 
must  have  an  undoubted  and  abiding  sense  of 
its  human  value  and  necessity. 

There  is  a  real  difference  between  human  neces- 
sity and  human  advantage.  Men  are  easily  con- 
fused between  the  thing  that  looks  desirable  and 
the  thing  that  appears  to  be  necessary.  They 
are  confused  in  this  regard  concerning  Jesus 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     101 

himself.  To  some  very  devout  thinkers  he 
appears  only  as  an  advantage,  the  very 
best  among  many  who  are  excellent.  They 
think  it  would  be  distinctly  good  if  he 
were  everywhere  approved  and  his  rule 
universally  accepted.  But,  surely,  this  does  not 
adequately  interpret  his  own  idea  of  his  own  call- 
ing. Such  a  ministry,  such  a  service  as  his  could 
not  have  come  to  pass,  could  not  have  been  en- 
dured, could  not  have  been  carried  on  steadily  if 
he  had  not  felt  it  all  the  while  to  be  a  human 
necessity.  It  would  have  broken  down,  just  as 
many  earnest  lives  do  break  down,  if  it  had 
rested  on  the  foundation  of  simple  human  benefit 
or  advantage.  One  can  see  a  half  dozen  places 
where  only  the  sense  of  human  necessity  carried 
Jesus  through.  He  could  not  have  paid  so  big 
a  price,  or  have  endured  what  he  did  endure, 
simply  for  something  that  was  desirable.  Hut- 
ton  has  some  profoundly  significant  sentences 
in  one  of  his  studies:  ''I  have  little  hope  of  any 
passionate  and  cordial  return  to  Christ  except 
out  of  a  returning  sense  of  necessity.  Deep 
calleth  unto  deep.  Religion  when  it  ceases  to  be 
felt  as  necessary  begins  to  chafe.  It  is  the  utter 
necessity  of  faith  which  flings  us  on  the  breast 
of  God."  Many  times  since  our  return  from 
India,  China,  and  Japan,  men  have  asked  seri- 
ously whether  the  people  of  those  countries  are 


102  THIS  MIND 

not  getting  along  pretty  well  with  the  religions 
they  have.  The  question  always  disturbs  me. 
It  seems  to  indicate  that  Jesus  Christ  is  not  a 
necessity  to  certain  parts  of  the  world;  that 
maybe  there  is  some  other  way  than  his  or  some 
other  name  than  his;  that  his  objects  are  only 
admirable — perhaps  most  admirable — among 
other  good  men's  good  objects,  but  that  neither 
Jesus  nor  his  program  is  a  necessity.  Wher- 
ever that  impression  exists  it  weakens  Chris- 
tianity to  the  point  of  destroying  its  power,  and 
leaves  us  helpless  before  lijfe's  deep,  real  needs. 
Indeed,  it  only  puts  a  soothing  ointment  into  our 
hands  and  not  a  real  cure. 

This  same  effect  is  produced  when  one  comes  to 
feel  that  he  might  as  well  do  something  else,  that 
what  he  is  doing  is  not  essential  to  anybody,  and 
that  it  is  not  essential  that  he  should  be  doing- 
it.  He  can  go  on  through  life  as  millions  have 
done  and  are  doing.  Life  will  have  no  more 
meaning  for  him  than  it  has  for  other  millions. 
He  will  be  neither  prophet,  priest,  nor  Messiah. 
His  life  will  never  strike  the  deepest  note  or  show 
the  sacramental  quality.  Obstacles  will  easily 
turn  him  aside.  He  will  not  go  forward  with  his 
face  set  toward  Jerusalem  at  any  cost.  A  reduc- 
tion of  salary,  a  small  criticism,  a  petty  opposi- 
tion will  make  him  fling  the  whole  thing  to  the 
winds.    Or,  what  is  just  as  bad,  he  will  abandon 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     103 

his  primary  passion  in  his  calling  and  give  him- 
self to  secondary  and  immediate  plans,  to  giving 
people  what  they  want.  And  he  will  talk  of 
democracy  and  the  voice  of  the  people,  of  re- 
sponding to  popular  demands  and  appeals.  If 
Nineveh  does  not  want  him  or  appeal  to  him,  he 
will  try  Tarshish.  The  voice  that  sent  him,  the 
necessity  that  was  laid  upon  him,  will  grow  dim 
in  his  ears  and  light  upon  his  conscience.  He 
will  easily  turn  to  the  Gentiles,  discbunt  his 
mission,  abandon  his  early  consecration,  and  for 
the  rest  of  his  life  talk  the  language  of  prudence 
and  pessimism.  What  is  far  worse,  he  will  show 
a  weak  will,  a  weak  personality,  and  a  weak  hold 
upon  his  calling.  Nothing  but  an  abiding  sense 
of  the  necessity  of  his  calling  will  sustain  him  in 
strength  as  he  goes  forward  in  it.  For  good 
reasons,  like  loss  of  health,  one  may  in  special 
cases  be  compelled  to  change  the  form  of  the  life 
in  which  he  fulfills  his  life  decision,  but  if  he 
changes  the  spirit  and  purpose  of  it,  or  lets  down 
the  passion  of  his  devotion  to  it,  ''then  dies  the 
man  in  him."  A  broken  voice  may  force  you  to 
quit  preaching,  but  if  you  quit  because  you  have 
lost  your  vision,  lost  heart  in  the  ministry,  lost 
the  sense  of  God's  necessity  to  human  life,  the 
Lord  have  mercy  on  your  own  soul.  For  Jesus 
Christ  is  not  a  temporary  answer  to  a  temporary 
need,  he  is  the  permanent  answer  to  the  eternal. 


104  THIS  MIND 

unceasing  necessity  to  which  there  is  no  other 
answer. 

2.  In  order  to  have  a  permanent  and  sustain- 
ing sense  of  strength  in  your  calling  you  must 
have  an  abiding  and  unquestioning  conscious- 
ness of  its  absolute  altruism  and  unselfishness. 
Nothing  will  more  surely  undo  a  good  and  sincere 
man  in  his  lifework  than  the  feeling  that  there 
is  a  selfish  element  in  him  or  in  it.  Of  course, 
there  are  people,  plenty  of  them — too  many  of 
them — w^ho  make  no  pretense  of  unselfishness. 
They  are  in  things,  often  in  the  best  things,  with 
a  jaunty  air  and  a  blase  attitude  toward  selfish- 
ness, as  though  it  were  of  small  concern.  But 
these  are  the  people  who  stay  in  things  while 
they  are  going  well  or  while  there  is  some  advan- 
tage to  themselves  in  staying  in.  They  do  not 
get  anywhere  near  the  center  where  Jesus  moved 
and.  was  strong.  They  wear  a  cross,  but  they  do 
it  for  symbolic  and  decorative  reasons.  They 
do  not  at  all  get  into  Saint  PauFs  deep  words 
about  being  crucified  with  Christ.  Indeed,  they 
resent  any  pressing  of  this  idea  as  extreme  and 
fanatical.  They  are  devotees  of  the  reasonable 
and  moderate.  But  in  this  business  of  unselfish- 
ness there  is  no  such  thing  as  the  moderate  and 
reasonable.  That  way  cannot  be  fitted  into  the 
way  of  Jesus.  He  did  not  live  his  life  on  the  com- 
mon basis  of  sharing  half  and  half.    He  certainly 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     105 

did  not  adopt  Jacob's  standard  which  seems  so 
wonderfully  liberal  to  so  many  people.  I  met 
a  man  one  day  who  was  fairly  bursting  with 
spiritual  pride  and  a  sense  of  unselfishness  be- 
cause he  had  that  year  given  ten  thousand  dollars 
for  Christian  work  of  various  sorts  and  had  only 
kept  ninety  thousand  for  himself!  He  was  an 
entirely  sensible  and  practical  person  from  his 
point  of  view  and  from  the  conventional  point  of 
view.  Of  course,  his  universe  never  gets  dis- 
turbed. He  keeps  it  steady.  And,  of  course  also, 
his  universe  never  gets  ahead.  It  just  goes  round 
and  round  until  some  time,  his  time  or  some 
other,  there  is  a  crash.  For  there  is  no  way  to 
preserve  the  steadiness  of  life  year  in  and  year 
out,  from  one  generation  to  another,  except 
Jesus'  way  of  perfect  unselfishness.  You  may 
not  think  him  practical,  but  his  practice  is  the 
only  one  that  works.  His  basis  is  the  only  one 
that  keeps  a  person  steady  and  strong  in  the  face 
of  all  sorts  of  experiences.  The  things  that 
happen  to  men  do  not  differ  so  much  as  the  things 
that  happen  in  men.  The  only  persons  who  are 
steady  in  an  earthquake  are  the  people  who  are 
not  thinking  of  its  effect  on  themselves.  The 
Master  of  the  absolutely  unselfish  life  is  the  only 
one  who  can  be  calm  when  the  boat  is  tossing. 
Thousands  of  men  have  ruined  themselves  and 
their  callings  by  becoming  anxious  about  their 


106  THIS  MIND 

own  fortunes  in  their  callings.  They  have  lost 
their  power  to  do  the  highest  good,  they  have 
become  fussed  and  troubled  because  they  have 
come  to  look  for  the  personal  advantages  that 
they  think  belong  to  doing  good.  Churches  often 
go  a  long  way  toward  ruining  their  altruism  by 
their  anxiety  over  the  question  of  the  credit  they 
get  for  being  benevolent.  You  may  depend  upon 
it,  the  selfish  life  is  never  a  strong  and  steady 
one.  Selfishness  permanently  disturbs  the  bal- 
ance, and  upsets  the  equilibrium  of  the  spirit. 
If  you  are  making  your  life  decision  with  the  idea 
that  you  will  make  some  bread  for  the  multitudes 
and  some  for  yourself,  that  you  will  save  your- 
self and  as  many  others  as  you  can,  that  you 
will  do  all  the  good  you  can  and  get  all  the 
rewards  and  advantages  out  of  it  that  can  be 
made  to  coma  your  way,  you  are  laying  up  for 
yourself  a  life  of  restlessness,  discontent  and  un- 
steadiness. You  will  be  weak  in  your  spirit 
and  in  your  calling,  weak  where  weakness  is 
fatal,  in  the  center  and  soul  of  your  very  being. 
You  can  walk  that  way  if  you  want  to,  but  you 
cannot  look  for  the  fellowship  of  the  Great  Com- 
panion who  never  wanted  anything  for  himself. 
"I  used  to  wonder  at  the  cross,''  wrote  an  Ameri- 
can soldier,  ''but  not  now.  I  think  Jesus  was  a 
lucky  man  to  have  a  chance  to  die  for  a  great 
cause."  There  is  no  other  way  to  tranquillity. 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     107 

3.  You  can  get  and  preserve  this  sense  of 
strength  by  making  sure  that  your  life  and  life 
purposes  are  in  line  with  the  best  ideals,  pur- 
poses, visions,  and  dreams  of  the  best  men  and 
women  through  the  centuries. 

The  world  is  not  beginning  with  you,  even 
though  you  may  think  so  or  may  wonder  how 
it  has  got  along  at  all  without  you.  The  stream 
of  history  has  been  running  a  tolerably  long 
time.  You  are  about  to  get  into  it  either  to  row 
or  to  drift.  My  first  anxiety  is  that  you  shall 
have  a  fair  general  understanding  of  it,  and  my 
second  that  you  shall  have  a  right  relation  to 
it.  We  are  not  starting  the  world  all  new.  Some 
people  think  it  would  be  well  if  we  could  smash 
the  existing  order  and  begin  all  over  again. 
Of  course  this  cannot  be  done,  and  such  experi- 
ments as  the  French  Revolution  and  other 
efforts  do  not  greatly  encourage  the  idea  of  doing 
it.  In  the  effort  to  get  a  fair  general  under- 
standing you  will  quickly  see  that  history  has 
not  all  been  bad  nor  all  been  good.  This  stream 
that  you  enter  is  not  absolutely  pure  nor  per- 
fectly polluted.  It  might  be  worse,  it  might  well 
be  much  better.  Your  ancestors  were  men  and 
women  of  many  faults  and  many  virtues.  They 
were  about  as  wise  and  about  as  foolish  as  their 
descendants.  From  them  you  can  learn  many 
things  to  do,  and  likewise  many  things  to  avoid. 


108  THIS  MIND 

"The  Faith  of  our  fathers"  of  which  we  rev- 
erently sing  had  many  superb  and  shining  quali- 
ties and  a  lot  of  errors  and  crude  superstitions. 
"The  oldtime  religion"  was  good  in  those  blessed 
respects  in  which  it  was  good,  but  it  evidently 
was  not  good  enough  to  make  our  fathers  per- 
fect or  to  save  the  world  through  which  they 
passed.  That  a  thing  is  old  does  not  prove  it 
to  be  either  true  or  good.  Its  age  may  only  prove 
it  to  be  tough  and  enduring. 

Nevertheless,  into  this  mixed  inheritance  we 
come,  and  come  inevitably.  There  is  no  other 
way  to  get  into  our  world  except  through  this 
flowing  human  stream.  We  cannot  ignore  it  or 
go  round  it.  Suppose,  then,  ignoring  further 
figures  of  speech,  we  look  squarely  at  our  atti- 
tude to  the  life  we  come  into  and  the  history  we 
inherit.  If  we  come  in  as  most  of  our  fathers 
have  done,  we  shall  be  as  restless  as  they  were 
and  as  weak  as  we  see  them  to  have  been.  If  we 
enter  the  life  of  our  day  as  Jesus  entered  the  life 
of  his,  we  may  be  strong  as  he  was  strong,  by 
allying  ourselves  with  only  the  best  and  highest 
forces  and  ideals  out  of  the  past  and  refusing  to 
conform  to  or  perpetuate  the  things  that  ought 
to  perish.  The  stream  of  history  will  grow  worse 
and  worse  or  better  and  better,  according  to 
what  is  poured  into  it  by  all  its  tributaries, 
which  tributaries  for  this  generation  you  are. 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     109 

If  the  faith  of  our  children  is  to  be  any  better 
than  the  faith  of  our  fathers,  if  the  new-time 
religion  is  to  be  any  better  than  the  imperfect 
old-time  religion,  it  will  be  because  you  put  your 
lives  for  to-day  and  to-morrow  in  with  the  best 
and  against  the  worst ;  because  you  and  the  next 
generation  and  the  ones  after  that  forever  ^'work 
upward,  working  out  the  beast''  in  human  life. 
Steadiness  and  strength,  wholesomeness  and  free- 
dom, are  obtained  by  improvement,  by  alliance 
with  the  ideals  and  forces  that  are  excellent. 
And  this  comes  by  purpose,  by  resolution,  by 
steady  determination  to  have  it  so.  Do  not  be 
fooled.  The  world  does  not  grow  better  simply 
because  it  grows  older. 

In  my  youth  the  township  where  I  lived  was 
divided  for  road-mending  and  road-making  pur- 
poses into  districts  over  which  men  called  super- 
visors were  placed.  Some  of  them  were  utterly 
incompetent,  some  utterly  indifferent,  some 
wholly  traditional.  The  roads  that  were  good 
enough  for  the  fathers  and  pioneers  were  good 
enough  for  them.  Some  of  them  had  an  idea  of 
better  roads  for  better  vehicles  and  better  days. 
But  not  one  of  them  made  a  road  fit  for  a  modern 
automobile,  and  not  one  made  an  all-the-year- 
round  road.  You  are  to  join  the  historic  fellow- 
ship of  road-makers  for  the  King.  Some  of  them 
have  done  their  work  badly.     The  King's  high- 


110  THIS  MIND 

way  as  made  by  them  was  hardly  fit  for  the 
King's  chariot.  They  filled  no  valleys  and  leveled 
no  hills.  When  the  King  struck  the  roads  made 
by  them  his  progress  was  either  stopped  or 
slowed  down.  The  story  as  told  in  history  is 
not  encouraging  or  cheerful.  Christianity  is 
not  half  as  far  along  to-day  as  it  ought  to  be  or 
as  it  could  have  been.  If  this  is  as  fast  as  it  is 
going  to  go,  it  will  never  overtake  or  lead  civili- 
zation. Some  of  the  road-makers  made  good 
stretches  of  road,  and  the  King  made  swift  prog- 
ress over  them,  only  to  strike  the  rough,  unfit, 
impassable  stretches  made  by  other  men  as  they 
always  had  been  made.  You  do  not  get  the 
sustaining  sense  of  strength  by  working  with 
that  group.  In  your  life  time,  even  in  mine  yet, 
the  highways  for  the  Lord  must  be  made  so  per- 
fect, by  men  and  women  working  with  the  best 
ideals  and  best  people  of  the  centuries,  that  the 
King's  progress  in  a  single  generation  shall  ex- 
ceed anything  he  has  reached  in  the  whole  Chris- 
tian era.  These  highways  must  run  across  con- 
tinents, run  between  nations  and  races,  so  that 
the  way  of  the  Lord  in  the  world  shall  be  smooth. 
If  you  can  help  to  make  such  a  way  for  him,  you 
will  save  your  own  life  from  destruction  on  the 
rough,  jolting  ways  over  which  your  fathers 
w^ent. 

4.  You  can  get  and  preserve  this  necessary 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     111 

sense  of  strength  and  steadiness  in  your  life  by 
making  sure  that  you  are  working  with  the  will 
of  God  and  not  against  it. 

Another  phase  of  this  was  mentioned  in  an 
earlier  lecture,  but  the  subject  naturally  comes 
back  again  at  this  point.  We  are  likely  to  be 
overborne  just  now  by  what  many  people  think 
to  be  fundamental  democracy,  namely,  running 
always  with  the  majority,  or  ^'It  always  pays  to 
shout  with  the  crowd,"  or  ''The  voice  of  the  peo- 
ple is  the  voice  of  God."  Of  course,  this  is 
not  democracy  at  all.  Over  and  over  the  ma- 
jority is  wrong  and  its  voice  is  against  God.  We 
do  not  get  our  highest  ideals  from  the  multitude 
or  have  them  confirmed  by  popular  vote.  Israel's 
"saving  remnant"  was  much  nearer  right  than 
Israel's  blundering  multitude.  When  the  crowd 
yelled  for  Barabbas,  the  place  of  real  strength 
and  steadiness  was  where  Jesus  stood  almost 
alone.  The  star  that  stays  where  it  ought  to  stay, 
no  matter  how  the  waves  toss  or  the  ship  turns, 
is  worth  much  more  than  its  weight  in  gold. 
The  will  of  God  is  not  tossed  about  by  the  gusts 
of  passion  and  self-interest  that  often  put  wrong 
on  the  throne.  We  agreed  that  we  must  work 
in  harmony  with  the  best  men  and  women,  with 
the  best  ideals  of  the  centuries.  Well,  we  must 
go  further  than  that  for  the  strength  that  will 
not  fail  even  if  we  must  climb  some  new  Calvary 


112  THIS  MIND 

as  part  of  the  day's  work.  We  must  not  go  into 
our  lifework  on  a  short  view  or  a  narrow  one, 
on  a  dim  vision  or  a  confused  one.  If  we  are 
going  in  to  be  strong  and  steady,  we  must  be 
very  sure  that  we  are  in  harmony  with  God's 
will,  God's  purposes,  God's  plans  for  the  world 
in  which  we  live. 

We  have  inherited  a  miserable  idea  that  the 
will  of  God  is  to  be  suffered  or  endured,  that  it 
is  hard  and  grinding,  that  it  finds  its  chief  ex- 
pression in  afflictions,  personal  trials,  and  dis- 
agreeable duties,  especially  forcing  choice  youth 
into  unattractive  occupations.  I  think  in  my 
youth  I  always  heard  the  will  of  God  spoken  of 
in  a  tone  of  resignation  or  conscious  martyrdom 
or  with  a  snivel.  Shouting  Methodists  were 
plenty,  but  I  never  heard  any  of  them  shouting 
over  the  will  of  God  as  a  thing  to  be  done.  They 
were  always  shouting  over  some  experience  of 
the  love  of  God  which  was  to  be  enjoyed.  But 
the  will  of  God  for  them  came  nowhere  near  the 
region  of  religious  enjoyment.  If  they  got  any 
pleasure  out  of  it,  it  was  in  spite  of  the  will  of 
God.  It  remained  for  me  to  discover  in  later  years 
a  different  note  in  the  matchless  life.  "I  do 
always  those  things  that  please  him.''  Wher- 
ever, whenever,  whatever  he  wants,  I  am  for  it, 
for  it  is  the  best  thing  going.  It  is  as  if  Jesus 
heard  God  always  saying,  "Come,  let  us  do  this 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     113 

or  that,  let  us  go  here  or  there,''  and  had  replied 
with  an  emphasis  Roosevelt  never  touched  with 
his  favorite  word,  ^'I  delight  to  do  thy  will,  for 
there  is  nothing  better."  Even  in  Gethsemane 
he  said,  not  with  a  sob  or  an  appeal  for  pity,  but 
with  a  shout  and  a  tone  of  victory:  ^^His  will, 
his  glorious  will,  his  beautiful  will  for  the  world 
and  for  me,  be  done,  done  no  matter  where  it 
leads.  Rise,  let  us  be  going,  before  Calvary  gets 
away  without  my  having  the  chance  to  climb  it 
with  a  cross." 

Jesus  had  a  lot  of  enthusiasms,  but  his  enthu- 
siasm for  the  will  of  God  in  the  world  and  in  his 
own  life  amounted  almost  to  an  obsession.  It 
was  not  a  vague  enthusiasm  for  humanity  or  for 
an  abstract  principle  or  a  good  cause.  He 
reveled  and  gloried  and,  if  he  had  done  such 
things,  he  would  have  rioted  in  the  will  of  God. 
And  in  Jesus'  relation  to  God's  will  you  must 
get  to  it.  In  him  you  must  see  what  it  is  and 
ought  to  be  for  you.  We  too  vaguely  take  the 
will  of  God  into  account  or  do  it  only  as  a  kind 
of  final  throw  of  pious  submission.  Jesus  lived 
in  it.  It  was  his  strength,  his  steadiness,  his 
peace,  his  everlasting  rapture. 

It  must  be  interpreted  in  the  light  of  such 
questions  as  these:  What  does  God  propose  in 
the  world?  What  kind  of  a  world  is  he  really 
trying  to  make?    What  is  he  trying  to  do,  what 


114  THIS  MIND 


he  been  trying  to  do  for  men  and  races? 
What  is  he  trying  to  teach  people  and  trying  to 
get  them  to  be  and  do?  If  he  had  his  way,  if 
his  will  were  done,  what  would  happen?  What 
kind  of  a  world  would  it  be  if  the  will  of  God 
should  be  done  in  it?  How  would  we  be  living 
in  this  year  1922  in  the  United  States,  in  Europe, 
in  Africa,  and  Asia  and  the  rest  of  the  world  if 
the  will  of  God  as  Jesus  knew  it  had  been  done 
for  the  last  score  of  years  or  were  being  done 
now?  What  would  be  happening  to  the  poor, 
the  rich,  the  ignorant,  the  educated,  the  weak, 
the  strong,  the  Negro,  the  Jew,  the  Chinaman, 
the  Russian,  the  German,  the  Englishman,  the 
American,  if  the  will  of  God  were  to  be  done?  I 
am  for  it.  I  cannot  see  anything  else  with  any 
great  promise  in  it,  cannot  see  anything  else 
worth  tying  up  fifty  years  of  endeavor  to.  This 
holds  the  future.  If  we  are  going  any  way  that 
is  worth  going,  this  is  the  only  way  to  go.  There 
are  no  other  standards  worth  conforming  to. 
This  is  not  a  party  ideal  nor  a  partial  one. 
Will  the  Pharisees  and  the  Sadducees  and  all 
their  modern  successors,  and  all  others  who 
divide  the  body  of  Christ,  please  step  aside  or 
step  into  line.  The  youth  of  the  w^orld,  the 
youth  of  the  colleges  are  proposing,  God  bless 
them,  proposing  with  a  shout,  to  make  a  new 
fellowship,  a  fellowship  with  Jesus,  the  fellow- 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     115 

ship  of  those  who  love  and  do  the  will  of  God. 
It  will  be  fair  as  the  moon,  bright  as  the  sun,  and 
terrible  as  an  army  with  banners.  This  is  the 
really  going  concern  in  the  world  to-day.  Are 
you  in  it?  God  is  the  great  endeavorer,  trying 
in  a  thousand  ways,  all  of  them  good.  Are  you 
with  him?  He  has  the  only  plan  that  looks  as 
though  it  would  work.  Are  you  going  into  it, 
or  only  partly  in,  or  wholly  into  some  other? 
If  3^ou  want  to  know  the  will  of  God,  if  you  want 
to  love  it,  if  you  earnestly  want  it  to  be  done, 
get  into  it  in  faith,  fellowship,  endeavor,  and 
enthusiasm  with  Jesus,  who  knew  what  it  was 
and  what  it  would  do,  and  who  conformed  his 
life  to  it. 

5.  You  will  get  and  maintain  the  sense  of 
strength  and  steadiness  in  your  life  and  its  pur- 
poses through  the  abiding  conviction,  based  upon 
wisdom,  that  your  life  plans,  if  worked  out, 
would  work  well. 

There  is  such  a  thing  as  Christian  pragmatism, 
the  trial  of  a  philosophy  or  plan  by  the  simple 
test,  "Does  it  work?"  By  this  test  your  plans 
must  be  judged,  by  it  the  purposes  of  Jesus  him- 
self are  judged.  In  his  case  we  are  making  a 
fundamental  blunder  through  getting  our  tenses 
and  moods  confused.  There  has  been  a  lot  of 
foolish  speculation  over  the  question :  "Would 
his  plans  have  worked  well  if  they  had  been  tried 


116  THIS  MIND 

through?"  The  implications  in  the  question  are 
that  he  belongs  to  the  past  and  that  the  fair  trial 
of  his  purposes  is  no  longer  possible.  Nothing 
could  be  further  from  the  fact.  He  and  his  plans 
hold  the  present  and  the  future.  At  this  hour 
there  is  really  no  other  who  is  even  claiming  to 
have  a  world  plan.  But  the  real  question  here 
is  whether  your  life  decisions  lead  you  to  a  life 
program  that  will  also  surely  work  clear  through 
for  world  advantage.  Human  life  and  society 
are  far  too  precious  to  be  experimented  on  by 
theorists  and  charlatans  who  do  not  know  how 
their  experiments  will  turn  out.  And  your  lives 
are  too  valuable  to  have  them  destroyed  by  the 
fever  of  uncertainty  and  wonder  as  to  their  out- 
come. Your  generation  ought  to  do  something 
far  better  than  just  to  leave  the  world  as  you 
found  it  or  even  a  little  better.  The  slow  pro- 
gress of  past  generations  is  too  slow.  We  have 
made  inventions  and  material  improvements  for 
life  faster  than  we  have  made  moral  gains.  This 
generation  that  is  now  young  ought  to  change 
that.  You  will  have  the  same  sense  of  weakness 
and  unsteadiness  that  your  fathers  have  had  if 
you  bring  no  higher  tests  to  your  lives  than  they 
brought  to  theirs.  As  Thomas  Arnold  put  it, 
^'We  must  be  superior  to  our  fathers  or  we  shall 
be  monstrously  inferior  to  them."  Old  heads  are 
weary,  but  we  are  persuaded  better  things  of  you 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     117 

than  of  ourselves.  When  we  were  young  we 
quoted  the  words  of  Lowell,  then  living  as  we 
were,  with  Civil  War  and  slavery  echoes  in  our 
souls : 

"Once  to  every  man  and  nation  comes  the  moment 
to  decide, 

In  the  strife  of  Truth  with  Falsehood,  for  the  good 
or  evil  side; 

Some  great  cause,  God's  new  Messiah,  offering  each 
the  bloom  or  blight, 

Parts  the  goats  upon  the  left  hand,  and  the  sheep 
upon  the  right, 

And  the  choice  goes  by  forever  'twixt  that  dark- 
ness and  that  light." 

But  the  choice  does  not  go  by  forever  even 
though  it  goes  by  for  one  group  or  one  genera- 
tion. "Every  day  is  a  fresh  beginning"  in  a  very 
real  sense.  "Every  morn  is  the  world  made  new'' 
in  a  very  true  way.  And  the  new  choices  come 
and  keep  on  coming  until  or  unless  we  have 
sinned  away  the  day  of  grace  of  new  opportuni- 
ties. 

I  fear  sometimes  that  God  may  have  grown 
discouraged  with  my  generation  as  a  whole, 
though  it  has  done  some  glorious  things;  that 
he  may  be  saying,  sorrowfully :  "I  cannot  expect 
much  more  from  that  crowd.  They  have  grown 
spiritually  conservative  and  cautious  and  have 
lost  the  spirit  of  adventure.  Maybe  the  best  that 
can  now  be  expected  of  them  is  that  they  shall 


118  THIS  MIND 

not  stand  in  the  way  of  youth  while  youth  girds 
up  its  loins  and  ties  its  shoes  to  run  as  heralds 
to  prepare  the  way  for  the  King  who  comes." 
For  it  is  Jesus  or  nobody,  as  the  thing  looks  to- 
day. And,  really,  also  he  has  to  depend  upon 
the  youth  of  America  and  Britain,  the  youth  of 
Asia  and  Europe,  the  youth  of  Africa  and  the 
islands  of  all  the  seas  to  give  him  a  new  real 
chance  again  in  the  w^orld.  Are  you  with  him? 
Can  he  count  on  you?  Has  he  your  vote?  Do 
your  decisions  match  up  with  his  plans  in  this 
sure  fashion? 

We  are  fairly  worn  out,  but  he  is  not  worn  at 
all.  He  is  neither  exhausted  with  weariness  nor 
pumped  out  to  emptiness.  Suppose,  then,  the 
youth  of  to-day  should  enthusiastically  go  after 
him,  loyally  go  with  him,  go  the  whole  length 
as  their  elders  have  not  done,  should  give  him 
their  word  and  stand  by  it  as  he  stood  by  his, 
what  would  happen? 

Jesus  must  depend  on  the  men  and  women  his 
own  age  and  younger  for  certain  things  older 
people  cannot  give  him.  Jesus  was  twelve  when 
he  made  the  doctors  marvel  at  him  as  at  a 
prodigy.  He  was  thirty  w^hen  he  began  his 
ministry.  But  then  men  of  fifty  and  sixty  find 
it  a  bit  hard  to  give  themselves  absolutely  and 
unreservedly  to  the  leadership  of  a  man  of  thirty, 
especially  if  his  way  looks  a  bit  revolutionary  to 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     119 

them.  Men  of  that  age  get  in  the  middle  of  the 
road,  they  are  afraid  to  violate  the  speed  limit, 
they  talk  about  the  fathers  and  the  old  order 
and  caution  their  age  not  to  go  too  fast.  It  was 
so  in  Jesus'  day ;  it  is  so  to-day.  College  men  on 
both  sides  of  the  sea  will  listen  to  men  of  my  age 
respectfully  because  of  our  age,  but  they  will 
not  leap  to  our  message  as  they  did  when  Henry 
Drummond  at  about  thirty  years  of  age  went 
from  college  to  college  with  the  breath  of  the 
morning  on  him,  calling  men  to  follow  that 
Other  One  who  was  the  same  age  as  himself.  I 
think  I  can  understand  the  elders  and  members 
of  the  Sanhedrin  who  did  not  understand  Jesus, 
but  I  cannot  understand  how  the  youth  of  his 
day,  or  the  youth  of  any  day,  fellows  like  that 
rich  young  ruler,  failed  to  see  his  meaning  for 
them  and  their  value  to  him,  and  let  their  chance 
go  by. 

For  example,  there  was  a  day  when  he  knew 
and  explained  how  to  save  the  world.  He  had 
thought  it  clear  through.  He  knew  the  truth, 
the  power,  the  way.  He  saw  the  end  from  the 
beginning.  His  plans  would  have  saved  the 
Jewish  nation  for  its  real  uses,  the  uses  that  have 
been  utterly  perverted  and  hopelessly  degraded 
in  the  world.  He  knew  the  way  to  save  the  Gen- 
tile world  that  had  no  special  relation  to  him. 
The  men  of  his  day,  the  elders  and  the  youth, 


120  THIS  MIND 

balked  and  failed  him.  They  took  a  referendum 
and  put  him  to  death.  And  the  so-called  Chris- 
tian centuries  followed,  centuries  that  are 
covered  with  blood,  centuries  that  have  come  to 
a  culmination  before  our  eyes  in  a  moral  and 
spiritual  world  welter.  The  history  of  it  all  is 
not  very  comfortable  reading. 

He  knows  now  how  to  save  the  modern  Jewish 
race,  the  race  whose  history  is  both  tragic  and 
glorious,  whose  condition  is  both  pitiful  and 
powerful.  The  way  to  its  salvation  lies  not  in 
Zionism,  nor  the  return  to  Palestine,  nor  in  the 
observance  of  the  ceremonies  of  Moses,  nor  in  the 
ancient  and  wonderful  law.  The  old  Jew  came 
over  those  paths,  to  the  turning  point  where  he 
went  in  the  wrong  direction.  The  old  Jew  is 
still  trying  the  old  way,  and  it  does  not  work. 
The  young  Jew  of  this  day  has  again  the  chance 
of  the  young  Jew  of  Jesus'  day,  to  go  with  him 
instead  of  with  the  Sanhedrin.  He  is  young. 
He  appeals  to  youth.  The  young  ruler  of  to-day, 
ruler  of  Jewish  opinion,  can  do  better  than  his 
ancient  ancestor  did.  The  other  one  walked 
away  from  the  only  Saviour  of  the  race  and  the 
world.  The  one  now  living  in  New  York,  in 
London,  in  Jerusalem  can  go  with  Jesus  and 
maybe  swing  this  generation  and  the  next  toward 
their  salvation.  There  is  no  other  way.  Their 
life  decisions  reach  into  the  very  fate  of   the 


TOWARD  THE  STRENGTH  OF  LIFE     121 

Jewish  people  in  the  world.    They  are  not  merely 
personal.    They  are  racial. 

He  knows  how  to  save  China  and  Japan  and 
India.  The  official  classes,  the  military  parties, 
the  hereditary  rulers,  the  hardened  conservatives 
do  not  see  it.  They  think  there  is  either  no  way 
at  all  or  some  other  way.  Their  conservatism, 
their  alliance  with  property  and  with  power  and 
their  lack  of  adventure  make  them  impossible. 
Maybe  they  can  keep  Jesus  out  and  block  the 
way  for  the  only  plan  that  will  work  well.  The 
hope  of  those  countries  for  to-day  and  to-morrow 
lies  not  in  the  young  political  revolutionists  who 
will  grab  power  into  their  own  hands.  For  those 
countries,  as  for  ours,  it  is  Jesus  or  chaos.  And 
the  youth  of  the  universities  and  colleges,  the 
men  and  the  women  who  have  studied  in  America 
and  Britain,  the  youth  who  are  the  makers  of 
to-morrow  can  make  China,  Japan,  and  India 
Christian.  Nobody  else  will  do  it.  No  one  else 
has  the  courage,  the  vision,  the  abandon,  the  free- 
dom, the  time,  the  contact  with  the  future,  the 
forward  look.  They  can  harden  as  their  fathers 
have  done  into  guardians  of  property  and  tradi- 
tion. If  they  do,  the  present  order  will  continue 
until  a  new  earthquake  breaks  up  the  world. 
They  can  lead  their  nations  as  they  will,  but  only 
by  going  Jesus'  way  with  him  can  they  lead  their 
nations  out.     Need  I  go  on?     Have  you  been 


122  THIS  MIND 

thinking  only  or  chiefly  of  young  Jew  or  young 
Oriental  and  not  chiefly  of  young  American? 
Your  life  decisions  run  into  something  far  beyond 
what  you  are  going  to  be  or  do.  They  run  into 
the  redemption  of  the  nations,  into  a  new  history 
in  which  Jesus  may  have  his  perfect  way  and 
the  world  its  final  salvation.  And  you  can  go 
into  your  life  work  with  steady  step  if  these  are 
the  principles  upon  which  you  walk.  And  you 
can  go  through  life  without  petty  fuss  and  fret 
if  these  principles  are  allowed  to  give  strength 
and  steadiness  to  you.  You  will  not  escape 
obstacle,  opposition,  or  hatred,  any  more  than 
that  Other  One  did.  But  these  principles  will 
keep  your  lives  from  being  broken  or  weakened 
from  within,  and  the  rest  is  victory. 


THIS  MIND  TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS 

In  the  last  analysis  all  vital  questions  are  per- 
sonal. All  life  decisions  run  both  soon  and  late, 
first  and  last,  into  personal  relations.  They  have 
their  final  and  deepest  meaning  in  their  personal 
contacts  and  outcome.  Causes  have  no  real 
meaning  other  than  their  personal  meaning. 
War  is  not  an  abstract  matter,  but  an  intensely 
personal  one,  involving  the  very  lives  of  both  sol- 
diers and  civilians,  involving  them  both  in  mis- 
fortune. Poverty  is  not  a  vague,  abstract,  im- 
personal condition,  to  be  understood  by  a  study 
of  charts,  or  cured  by  an  aphorism.  Poverty  is 
tragically  personal  and  has  to  do  with  the  food, 
the  clothing,  the  homes,  the  health,  the  education, 
the  happiness,  and  even  the  faith  of  men  and 
women  and  children.  Temperance  is  not  a  cause 
in  its  actual  and  appealing  essence.  It  is  a 
purely  human  issue  running  so  deep  into  the  lives 
of  human  beings  that  it  bleeds  wherever  and 
whenever  you  cut  into  it.  The  so-called  social 
question  is  at  last  a  strictly  personal  and  human 
question.  The  era  just  gone  has  been  in  special 
degree  the  era  of  the  social  emphasis.    Possibly 

123 


124  THIS  MIND 

the  period  in  which  the  college  men  and  women 
of  to-day  will  live  their  lives  and  do  their 
work  may  continue  to  be  such  an  era.  But  the 
social  question  has  absorbed  many  good  people 
merely  as  a  question,  has  led  to  the  proclamation 
of  many  very  noble  social  theories  and  principles, 
without  reaching  any  very  notable  change  in 
personal  relations  which  is  really  the  center,  the 
crux  of  the  whole  problem.  The  social  principles 
and  teachings  of  Jesus  have  been  profoundly 
studied  and  ably  expounded  by  many  earnest 
men  and  women.  The  literature  of  this  subject 
was  never  so  abundant  or  so  excellent  as  now. 
But  your  life  decision  must  go  much  deeper  than 
simply  the  acceptance  of  these  admirable  social 
theories  so  finely  set  forth  in  our  time.  The  life 
decisions  of  Jesus  ran  straight  into  personal 
relations,  his  relations  with  persons.  And  these 
relations  were  immediate,  direct,  and  wholly  his 
own.  He  was  not  an  armchair  friend  of 
humanity  in  the  abstract,  not  a  philosopher  spec- 
ulating about  humanity.  He  had  personal  con- 
cern for  and  personal  contact  with  all  sorts  of 
persons.  That  was  where  his  life  purpose  and 
decision  led  him  and  kept  him.  He  never  allowed 
himself  to  get  at  even  one  remove  from  these 
personal  interests. 

You  will  find  a  marked  tendency  in  the  world 
and  even  in  your  own  lives  pretty  soon  for  men 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  125 

and  women  to  become  absorbed  in  organization. 
It  may  be  a  church,  or  a  Christian  Association, 
or  a  missionary  society,  or  some  other  great  con- 
cern. These  and  like  organizations  have  to  be 
administered.  There  is  no  other  way.  But  woe 
betide  the  men  and  women  whose  life  calling 
makes  them  at  last  only  organizers  and  adminis- 
trators of  institutions,  however  necessary  and 
useful.  The  organization  grows  in  their  lives, 
and  the  individual,  human  spirit  withers,  and 
humanity  as  existent  in  individuals  has  lost  one 
more  chance. 

First:  My  first  point,  then,  for  to-day  is  that 
every  calling  must  be  thought  of  and  interpreted 
in  the  light  of  its  meaning  for  personality.  Every 
calling  is  a  human  calling  or  it  is  no  calling  at 
all.  Many  of  the  callings  that  lay  hold  of  men 
and  women  have  got  clear  away  from  their  real 
center  and  need  to  be  brought  back  to  it.  In 
other  words,  the  very  first  thing  to  do  with  more 
than  one  of  the  large  forms  of  human  activity 
is  to  humanize  it.  There  is  an  everlasting  tend- 
ency from  which  no  occupation  escapes  to  become 
dehumanized  or  professionalized.  When  that 
tendency  reaches  its  natural  outcome  the  result 
is  beyond  w^ords.  For  a  merely  professional 
interest  in  men  and  w^omen,  or  in  your  calling 
itself,  is  both  unprofessional  and  inhuman. 
Therefore  I  emphasize  this  point  of  the  necessity 


126  THIS  MIND 

of  the  human  spirit  as  fundamental,  no  matter 
what  you  are  going  to  do.  If  you  are  not  going 
to  organize  your  life  around  its  human  purpose, 
test  it  by  its  human  quality  and  outcome,  then 
your  life  decision  goes  straight  away  from  and 
even  straight  into  conflict  with  the  mind  of 
Christ.  Teachers  are  not  primarily  teachers  of 
subjects,  primary,  secondary,  or  advanced.  If 
one  regards  himself  as  a  teacher  of  a  subject,  he 
will  become  that  deadly  bane  of  the  school,  a 
teacher  more  concerned  about  his  subject  than 
about  his  students.  He  will  develop  intellectual 
pride  because  he  knows  things,  which  will  become 
intellectual  dryness,  because  things  are  all  he 
knows,  and  end  in  intellectual  sterility  because 
personal  interest  is  lacking.  It  is  the  pupil  and 
the  human  interest  that  lie  in  his  life,  that  save 
the  teacher  from  the  evil  tendencies  of  his  own 
calling.  Physicians  are  not,  in  the  soul  of  them, 
men  and  women  who  practice  medicine.  Not 
such  a  physician  was  William  MacLure,  the  coun- 
try Doctor  of  the  Old  School.  He  and  all  true 
physicians  are  devoted,  soul  and  body,  to  their 
human,  suffering  patients.  A  doctor  ought  to  be 
so  human  that  the  death  of  a  patient  would  just 
about  send  him  to  bed  for  sheer  grief  over  the 
loss  of  a  life.  It  would  not  be  fair  for  me  to  give 
the  impression  that  the  ministry  is  exempt  from 
this  tendency.    It  is  not  exempt.    A  score  of  influ- 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS         127 

ences  tend  to  harden  and  deliumanize  it.  Some  of 
these  influences  are  not  bad  in  themselves.  Take 
the  minister's  interest  in  his  doctrines,  his  truth, 
his  studies.  They  cannot  have  a  subordinate  or 
minor  place  in  his  life.  He  must  study.  He 
ought  to  study  harder  than  any  other  man  in  the 
world.  He  must  master  doctrines  and  follow 
truth  to  its  last  reach.  But  his  fundamental 
passion,  the  passion  that  saves  him  from  aloof- 
ness, out-of-touchness,  and  even  from  intellectual 
death  at  last,  is  the  human  passion  for  the  men 
and  women  of  all  ages  and  kinds  to  whom  God 
has  sent  him.  All  his  truth  is  for  them.  All  his 
doctrines  are  in  their  behalf.  He  must  study 
"daily,  nightly  and  eternally,^'  not  because  he  is 
a  student,  but  because  he  is  a  minister  to  people. 
He  has  no  abstract  interest,  as  a  minister,  in 
abstract  truth.  His  lot  in  life  has  been  cast  in 
the  one  most  passionately  human  occupation  in 
the  hands  of  men. 

I  am  trying  to  say  that  in  your  life  decisions 
you  must  hold  firmly  to  the  human  interest  and 
personal  values,  as  dominant  and  controlling. 
Everything  must  bend  to  them  and  conform  to 
them.  Some  of  you  will  not  be  teachers  or 
physicians  or  ministers.  Some  of  you  will  be 
merchants,  bankers,  engineers,  or  farmers,  and 
you  will  go  in,  as  like  as  not,  on  a  false  basis. 
You  want  to  regard  these  as  "callings,"  "call- 


128  THIS  MIND 

ings"  in  the  Christian  sense,  and  you  will  find, 
after  you  get  into  them,  that  the  ideals  that  rule 
them  are  mainly  material  and  commercial  and 
not  Christian  at  all.  You  will  hear  enough  about 
^'business  principles"  to  break  your  spirit.  And 
you  will  be  told  whenever  you  bring  a  new  note 
into  things,  that  ^'business  is  business."  You 
will  hear  about  efficiency  until  you  will  fairly 
hate  it.  You  will  not  be  dishonest  or  unfair. 
You  will  not  break  the  laws  of  the  land,  most 
of  which  relate  to  property  directly  and  only  a 
few  to  human  interest  as  an  immediate  concern, 
but  you  will  have  the  fight  of  your  life  to  keep  the 
human  note,  the  human  interest,  the  human  pas- 
sion, dominant  enough  to  warrant  you  in  regard- 
ing these  occupations  as  being  anywhere  near 
^'callings"  according  to  the  mind  of  Christ.  No 
calling  that  you  will  go  into  is  free  from  this 
tendency.  There  is  an  old  scripture,  full  of 
meaning  when  read  with  proper  emphasis,  that 
bears  directly  upon  this  point.  A  prophet  was 
ordered  to  guard  a  man,  under  severe  penalty 
for  failure.  And  the  prophet  let  him  get  away, 
saying  weakly  to  the  king,  "As  thy  servant  was 
busy  here  and  there,  the  man  escaped."  That 
is  the  long,  sad,  human  story.  The  servants  of 
Ood  are  busy  here  and  there,  rushing  to  and  fro, 
fussing  over  things,  and  men  escape.  Sometimes 
it  is  the  man  in  the  care  of  the  prophet,  some- 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  129 

times  it  is  the  man  in  the  prophet  himself,  but 
whenever  it  happens,  a  new  chapter  in  misfor- 
tune is  written. 

And  you  will  early  discover  that  you  find  it 
easier  to  have  and  maintain  an  indirect  human 
interest  than  an  immediate  one.  It  is  easier  to 
have  and  to  preach  noble  sentiments  concerning 
people  than  it  is  to  maintain  noble  practices  and 
attitudes  among  them.  It  is  easier  to  frame, 
harmonize,  and  hold  a  lot  of  principles  than  to 
get  along  with  a  lot  of  very  concrete  persons. 
Many  people  fool  themselves  into  believing  that 
they  are  real  human  beings  because  they  quote 
with  approval  certain  sentimental  verse,  or  weep 
over  pathetic  play  or  novel,  or  send  checks  to 
charity  organizations.  There  ought  to  be  a 
course  in  all  schools,  from  grades  through  uni- 
versities, on  how  to  be  a  human  being. 

We  are  thinking,  all  the  while,  of  life  decisions 
and  just  now  are  emphasizing  the  fundamental 
truth  that  all  our  decisions  and  the  lives  that 
follow  them  must  be  intensely,  deeply,  constantly 
human.  And  we  cannot  help  thinking  how  that 
other  young  Person  made  his  decisions  in  the 
light  of  his  human  relations.  Nor  can  we  help 
thinking  of  the  life  that  followed.  The  memory 
and  vision  of  that  set  our  pulses  to  hammering. 
He  did  the  thing  we  want  to  do.  He  proved 
that  it  can  be  done.    The  organization,  the  insti- 


130  THIS  MIND 

tiition  never  ineriisted  or  overbore  him.  Having 
loved  his  own,  not  a  very  lovely  or  lovable  lot, 
he  loved  them  clear  through  to  the  end.  He  did 
it.  It  can  therefore  be  done.  Really,  I  would 
know  that  it  could  be  done  because  it  is  so  good, 
so  necessary,  so  inevitable  if  humanity  is  to  come 
to  anything.  But  to  have  seen  it  is  enough  to 
set  us  shouting.  Since  it  has  been  done  by  the 
living  Christ,  it  can  be  done  with  the  living 
Christ.  An  English  writer  the  other  day  pointed 
out  the  difference  between  memories  that  are 
fading  and  examples  that  are  compelling.  Then 
he  added :  ^'We  march  to  the  dying  music  of  great 
traditions.  There  is  no  captain  of  civilization  at 
the  head  of  our  ranks."  But  as  the  Lord  liveth 
and  as  my  soul  liveth,  I  declare  my  conviction 
that  we  have  an  example  that  is  compelling, 
that  we  march  to  stirring  music  of  high  adven- 
ture, with  the  Great  White  Captain  at  our  head. 
This  is  a  going  concern.  Jesus  is  a.  forward-going 
Person.  He  holds  the  future.  He  was  the  light 
on  this  real  problem,  and  in  Browning's  words, 
^^The  light  that  did  burn  will  burn.'' 

Second :  But  this  very  talk  of  humanizing  our 
decisions  and  our  callings  leads  us  farther.  It 
does  not  end  here.  History  and  experience  teach 
us  many  things,  nothing  more  surely  than  this, 
that  you  cannot  humanize  your  decision  nor 
your  life  service  except  by  Christianizing  the 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  131 

decision  and  forever  striving  to  Christianize  the 
order,  the  group,  the  activity  that  you  go  into. 
You  may  decide  to  be  a  Christian  teacher,  a 
Christian  lawyer,  a  Christian  farmer,  banker, 
engineer,  editor,  or  a  Christian  doctor.  Thou- 
sands of  others  have  done  that.  We  have  had 
and  we  do  have  Christian  men  and  women  in 
every  calling  named.  We  have  no  better  indi- 
vidual Christians  than  many  who  can  be  found  in 
those  occupations.  But  that  does  not  cover  the 
case.  A  life  decision  simply  to  be  a  Christian 
farmer  will  leave  the  whole  farming  question  just 
w^here  it  is  as  far  as  you  are  concerned.  A  friend 
writes  me  these  serious  w  ords :  "I  hope  you  will 
help  the  chap  who  is  going  into  business,  or 
engineering,  or  farming,  etc.,  to  see  that  he  must 
organize  his  business,  his  engineering,  his  farm- 
ing around  a  Christian  purpose.  So  often  he 
thinks  he  can  count  one  of  these  types  of  work  a 
^calling,'  yet  when  he  gets  out  into  it  the  ^Chris- 
tian' technique  of  it  all  is  so  uncharted  that  he 
does  not  know  how  to  work  it  out  and  the  vision 
fades.  I  wonder  how  a  Grenfell  would  work  out 
his  medical.  Christian  vision  in  London  or  New 
York,  or  just  what  Sam  Higginbotham  would 
call  Christian  farming  in  McLean  or  Champaign 
County.  .  .  .  What  I  am  trying  to  say  is 
that  the  business  man,  farmer,  engineer,  banker, 
lawyer,  etc.,  who  thinks  that  providing  support, 


132  THIS  MIND 

personal  and  financial,  for  the  church  and  other 
ideal  causes  is  the  way  he  is  to  function  as  a 
Christian,  the  way  he  is  to  fulfill  the  life  decision 
made  at  Lake  Geneva  or  elsewhere,  needs  to  see 
that  within  the  calling  he  has  been  chosen  by, 
there  is  a  Christianizing  process  needed  at  his 
hands."  The  old  order  will  remain  and  not  give 
place  to  the  new  until  this  happens.  We  can 
see  where  the  present  practice  has  brought  us. 
It  has  not  introduced  or  established  the  mind  of 
Christ  in  these  occupations.  This  same  friend 
adds:  '^It  is  not  ^old  diplomats'  only  who  are 
ruining  the  world,  but  'old  engineers,'  'old 
bankers,'  'old  farmers,'  etc.  They  are  living  their 
lives  according  to  the  standards  of  their  occupa- 
tions, but  they  must  be  made  to  see  and  feel  the 
chance  for  Christianizing  their  social  order,  their 
particular  occupational  order."  The  life  deci- 
sion to  be  a  farmer  in  Dakota  or  Alberta  is  not 
a  life  decision  according  to  the  mind  of  Christ  if 
it  simply  looks  toward  better  crops  of  grain  and 
a  personal  Christian  life.  It  is  only  a  true  life 
decision  according  to  his  mind  when  it  gives 
itself,  positively,  persistently,  affectionately,  un- 
wearyingly  to  Christianizing  the  farming  order 
in  Dakota  and  Alberta.  Here  is  a  chance  for 
pioneers,  a  chance  wide  as  the  occupations  of 
men  and  women,  a  chance  that  Jesus  would  leap 
to,  a  chance  that  would  go  far  tow^ard  saving  the 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  133 

world.     It  is  the  only  way  to  make  a  ^^calling" 
out  of  an  occupation. 

The  brilliant  young  layman  who  edits  The 
Century  declares  that  he  could  name  twenty 
American  business  men  who  could  bring  peace 
into  the  industrial  w^orld  if  with  consecration 
and  sacrifice  they  would  set  themselves  to  find- 
ing and  making  the  way  out.  And  if  that  does 
not  constitute  a  Christian  calling,  it  would  be 
hard  to  find  one.  If  the  twenty  men  of  to-day 
do  not  do  it,  twenty  men  of  to-morrow  must.  For 
this  is  the  human  problem,  the  Christian  problem 
that  lies  in  that  area  of  life.  Of  course,  w^e  never 
shall  get  through  as  long  as  we  think  this  is  only 
a  question  of  shorter  hours  and  larger  wages,  or 
longer  hours,  lower  wages,  and  larger  dividends. 
And  this  problem,  like  most  others,  can  only  be 
met  by  the  men  who  are  within  it.  External 
evangelism  can  never  be  anything  but  partial 
and  imperfect.  The  humanizing  and  Christian- 
izing of  the  order  of  farmers,  engineers,  bankers, 
and  the  like  lies  at  last  in  the  hands  of  farmers, 
engineers,  and  bankers.  You  can  go  into  any 
one  of  these.  You  may  prosper  according  to  the 
ordinary  standards  in  any  of  them.  But  if  you 
are  proposing,  as  you  ought,  to  grow  through  a 
consecrating  life  decision  into  one  of  them,  you 
must  look  for  and  make  a  new  order  before  your 
sun  sets  at  the  end  of  your  day. 


134  THIS  MIND 

Third:  My  third  point  on  this  subject  must 
relate  to  the  sense  of  human  values  which  men 
carry  into  their  life  decisions.  I  would  not  need 
to  argue  the  value  of  a  million  dollars.  Every- 
body sees  or  thinks  he  sees  how  desirable  such  a 
sum  would  be.  That  is  a  standard  with  which  w^e 
are  all  familiar.  If  a  man  looks  particularly  well 
or  feels  so,  he  is  playfully  told  or  playfully  says 
that  he  looks  or  feels  ^'like  a  million  dollars." 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  he  is  low  in  his  mind,  he 
feels  '^like  thirty  cents."  These  easy,  flippant 
sentences  assume  that  human  life  and  conditions 
can  be  measured  by  these  standards.  And  it  is 
hard  even  in  a  democracy  for  us  to  hold  a  level 
sense  of  human  values.  Our  theories  as  stated 
in  the  Declaration  of  Independence  rather  break 
down  in  the  presence  of  individuals  to  whom  the 
Declaration  does  not  seem  to  apply.  We  are  con- 
fused between  the  truth,  which  we  feel  must  be  a 
real  truth  in  the  noble  sentence,  and  the  apparent 
worth  of  certain  individuals.  Our  poetry  con- 
cerning the  value  of  a  man  we  feel  must  be  true. 
There  is  no  other  way  to  live  than  upon  such 
theories  as  the  poet  sings.  He  cannot  sing  on  any 
other  key.  But  practically  we  find  it  hard  to 
make  the  splendid  verse  fit  certain  squalid 
humanity  that  we  know.  We  do  not  want  to  sur- 
render our  ideals  or  our  lofty  principles,  and  we 
do  not  want  to  deceive  ourselves  as  to  the  actual 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  135 

facts  of  human  life,  the  apparent  values  of  men 
and  women.  This  is  one  of  those  disturbing 
anomalies  that  life  is  so  full  of.  No  one  wants 
to  make  a  life  decision  to  give  his  life  unre- 
servedly to  human  service  if  human  life  is  not 
worth  such  a  consecration.  More  than  one 
radiant  spirit  has  been  broken  by  the  hard  facts 
of  human  life.  The  loss  of  the  sense  of  life's 
infinite  value  cuts  the  nerve  of  sacrificial  devo- 
tion. When  one  comes  to  his  lifework  with  an 
idealized  humanity  in  his  mind  and  finds  that 
he  has  to  work  with  and  work  for  a  materialized, 
commercialized,  or  even  a  brutalized  humanity, 
his  very  first  temptation  in  his  discouragement  is 
to  doubt  the  worth-whileness  of  his  consecration, 
or  to  compromise  by  hunting  some  more  promis- 
ing materials.  When  the  Jews  to  whom  he  hope- 
fully goes  ruthlessly  trample  on  his  high  pur- 
poses and  break  him  on  the  hard  wheel  of  in- 
difference and  opposition,  he  is  sorely  tempted 
to  pick  up  what  consecration  he  has  left  and  go 
off  to  some  Gentiles  somewhere  who  from  a 
distance  look  more  promising.  I  know  what  lies 
ahead  of  you.  But  I  know  also  what  that  Other 
One  found  in  his  path.  And  in  this  matter,  as  in 
all  the  rest,  I  want  that  the  mind  that  was  in  him 
and  continued  to  be  in  him  shall  also  be  in  you. 
The  hard  facts  of  human  life  struck  him  fully 
as  hard  as  they  will  ever  strike  you.    They  killed 


136  THIS  MIND 

him,  at  last,  as  far  as  such  a  person  can  be  killed 
by  such  forces.  If  ever  a  person  could  be  justi- 
fied in  quitting,  Jesus  was  so  justified.  But  it 
never  seems  to  have  occurred  to  him  to  give  up. 
As  I  read  his  story,  the  story  of  what  he  ran 
up  against  with  the  people  he  worked  with,  I 
have  two  w^onders  in  my  mind :  I  wonder  how  he 
held  on  in  the  face  of  the  actual,  evident  human 
facts,  and  I  wonder  at  what  particular  point 
my  own  spirit  would  have  broken  and  led  me  to 
quit.  Then  I  get  down  on  my  knees  and  thank 
God  that  he  did  not  lose  heart  even  when  Peter 
played  the  fool  or  Judas  the  traitor  or  when  the 
others  w^ere  so  dull.  And  on  my  knees  in  grati- 
tude, I  pray  that  this  mind  may  also  be  in  me, 
and  in  you,  and  all  the  rest  of  us.  He  evidently 
saw  under  the  surface,  the  ugly  surface,  the 
immediate  meaning  of  personality,  the  universal 
meaning  of  personalit}^,  and  the  eternal  meaning 
of  personality,  and  because  of  what  he  saw,  could 
say  the  finest  words  ever  spoken  as  to  life  serv- 
ice :  ''For  their  sakes  I  sanctify  myself,  that  they 
may  be  sanctified  in  the  truth."  For  their  sakes 
— they  are  worth  it;  I  make  myself  fit  and  offer 
myself  up — that  is  my  life  service ;  that  they  may 
be  made  fit  and  may  enter  the  royal  fellowship 
of  service  in  the  truth — that  is  the  end,  and  it 
is  worth  while.  He  kept  his  pronouns  perfectly 
straight — as  severe  a  test  as  any  man  or  w^oman 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  137 

ever  meets.  But  here  is  where  you  get  your  true 
idea  of  the  worth  of  human  life.  You  do  not 
get  it  from  the  philosophers  or  poets.  You  get 
it  in  seeing  what  Jesus  proposed  to  do  for  men, 
what  he  thought  they  were  worth.  The  price 
mark  on  them  is  his  image,  or  if  you  choose  to 
say  it,  his  cross.  They  are  worth  that.  And  if 
they  are  worth  that  to  him,  they  are  worth  it 
to  us.  If  he  decided  his  lifework  and  lived  his 
life  on  this  theory  as  to  the  worth  of  men,  I  see 
no  other  theory  for  any  one  of  us.  The  mind  that 
is  in  us  must  be  the  mind  that  was  in  him.  He 
was  the  only  real  expert  judge  of  the  worth  of  a 
man.  Neither  the  pessimist  nor  the  optimist,  the 
rhapsodist  nor  the  specialist  can  take  a  place 
with  him. 

One  of  my  young  minister  friends  read  these 
lectures  before  they  were  spoken.  Among  other 
things  he  writes  these  words  which  I  gladly  add 
to  my  own  pages :  ^'I  wonder  w^hether  you  have 
sufficiently  stressed  the  fact  of  Christ's  faith  in 
man.  The  mind  of  Jesus  is  a  miracle  to  me.  No 
other  mind  that  has  dreamed  under  our  human 
sky  had  so  long  a  flight  of  thought,  so  clear  a 
vision  of  reality.  Nothing  is  more  awe-inspiring 
than  his  faith  in  the  kingdom  of  God  as  a  prac- 
tical program  and  policy  for  the  world.  And 
that  kingdom  he  declared  should  be  built  out  of 
the  familiar  and  lovable  things  of  every  day. 


138  THIS  MIND 

If  any  one  had  a  right  to  be  a  cynic  or  a  pessi- 
mist, it  was  Jesus.  Nevertheless,  after  receiv- 
ing hate  as  the  reward  of  love,  he  believed  in  man 
right  uj)  to  the  cross.  Do  we  not  need  to  go  at 
least  that  far  before  our  doubts  are  to  be  taken 
as  valid?'' 

Fourth :  My  fourth  point  in  this  connection  is 
that  Jesus  interpreted  his  life  decision  and  life- 
work  on  the  basis  of  an  equal  interest  in  people 
w^ho  themselves  were  very  different  from  one 
another.  Some  of  his  own  sayings  seem  to  mean 
the  other  thing.  His  emphasis  upon  his  mission 
to  the  lost  sheep  of  the  house  of  Israel,  upon  his 
calling  of  sinners,  not  righteous,  to  repentance; 
his  zeal  for  the  lost  sheep,  the  lost  coin,  and 
the  prodigal  son,  lend  color  to  this  special  inter- 
pretation. But  a  study  of  his  life  as  a  whole 
corrects  our  partial  views  and  saves  us  from 
making  narrow  and  partial  relationships.  He 
sought  each  individual  on  the  basis  of  that  indi- 
viduaFs  need  and  capacity.  He  did  not  propose 
to  go  blindly  after  all  individuals  as  though  they 
were  all  alike.  Some  were  lepers,  some  were 
harlots,  some  were  publicans,  some  rich  rulers, 
some  unfortunate,  some  prosperous,  some  weak, 
some  strong.  What  the  historic  prayer  describes 
as  "all  classes  and  conditions  of  men"  were  in  his 
full  view.  His  work  was  for  each  according  to 
his  need,  his  call  was  from  each  according  to  his 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  139 

ability,  but  Ms  interest  was  uniform.  He  played 
no  favorites.  There  are  many  whose  life  goes 
wrong  here.  Seeing  clearly  what  a  given  group 
or  class  needs,  moved  by  the  condition  of  those 
who  are  unfortunate  either  by  reason  of  sick- 
ness or  poverty,  they  fling  their  lives  into  serv- 
ice for  the  single  class,  sometimes  almost  with 
bitterness  toward  other  classes.  I  know  men, 
for  instance,  who  have  no  gospel  at  all  except 
for  the  group  which  they  have  chosen  as  their 
own.  And,  as  a  rule,  this  prevents  their  having 
any  true  gospel  of  Christ  even  for  their  own 
group.  No  matter  what  group  they  choose  they 
get  into  a  false  attitude  to  it  through  their 
failure  to  take  Jesus'  attitude  to  all  other  groups. 
There  is  a  specialization  that  leads  inevitably 
to  falsity  of  view.  A  recent  writer  has  pointed 
out  that  "the  constant  contemplation  of  maps 
colored  red  undoubtedly  leads  to  failure  to 
appreciate  the  other  colors  of  the  palette."  And 
Mr.  Balfour  has  remarked  upon  "the  difficulty 
of  finding  any  enthusiast  who  will  tell  the  simple 
truth."  He  does  not  mean  to  tell  an  untruth, 
but  he  neither  sees  life  steady  nor  sees  it  whole, 
whereas  it  was  exactly  the  strength  of  Jesus  that 
he  did  see  it  steady  and  see  it  whole.  Your  work 
may  be  with  a.  particular  group,  class,  or  race, 
but  your  work  will  not  be  at  its  best  if  you  for- 
get that  your  group,  your  class,  your  race,  is  an 


140  THIS  MIND 

integral  and  essential  part  of  mankind  as  a 
whole;  and  that  at  other  points,  with  other 
groups,  other  races,  other  classes,  other  men  and 
women  like  yourselves  are  lifting  and  lighting 
toward  that 

"One  far  off  divine  event 
Toward  which  the  ichole  creation  moves." 

There  is  not  a  piece  of  human  life  on  the  planet 
that  is  not  worth  any  best  man's  best  efforts, 
and  there  is  not  a  piece  anywhere  that  is  going 
to  be  helped  or  saved  by  being  hated  or  scorned 
or  held  in  bitterness  or  indifference. 

Fifth :  My  fifth  point  is  that  this  mind  toward 
other  persons  finds  its  real  expression  in  friend- 
ship. You  may  begin  by  being  patrons  of  and 
workers  with  a  given  group,  but  this  cannot  be 
the  end  of  your  relation  if  your  life  service  is 
to  go  according  to  the  mind  of  Christ.  You  may 
give  people  money,  you  may  give  them  work, 
you  may  give  them  justice,  you  may  give  them 
comfort,  you  may  give  them  education,  you  may 
give  them  art  and  music,  and  even  religion  of  a 
sort,  but  if  you  do  not  give  them  friendship, 
your  work  among  them  remains  professional  and 
formal  and  incomplete.  This  may  not  be  the 
basis  upon  which  it  begins.  Friendship  is  not 
the  product  of  simple  resolution,  even  of  good 
resolution.    Your  work  may  begin  on  the  basis 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  141 

of  interest  and  duty,  but  somewhere  along  the 
line  the  fine  flower  of  genuine  friendship  must 
break  into  bloom,  or  there  is  something  wrong. 
The  future  has  nothing  better  to  offer  you  than 
this  precious  relation.  It  had  nothing  better  to 
offer  Jesus  himself.  There  are  many  episodes 
in  his  life  which  thrill  and  grip  us.  There  is 
none  over  which  I  linger  more  gladly  than  I  do 
over  the  moment  when  he  said  to  his  small 
crowd :  ''Henceforth  I  call  you  friends."  Do  not 
miss  the  whole  meaning  of  the  story  by  your 
interest  in  one  phase  of  it.  What  it  meant  to  the 
men  who  heard  it  is  almost  beyond  our  conce^D- 
tion.  I  wonder  often  what  would  have  happened, 
what  I  would  have  done,  if  I  had  been  one  of  the 
men  to  whom  he  said  that.  You  may  be  sure  there 
would  have  been  a  storm  or  some  overwhelming 
demonstration  in  the  face  of  such  a  statement. 
But  the  feelings  of  the  men  is  only  part  of  the 
story.  Think  of  Jesus'  own  feeling  as  he  finally 
uttered  that  noble,  that  infinitel}^  personal  word. 
He  had  been  their  Teacher,  their  Saviour,  their 
Physician,  their  Leader,  their  Master.  They  had 
been  his  disciples,  his  converts,  his  patients,  his 
followers,  his  servants.  And  that  is  a  great  deal. 
But  if  that  is  all  he  gets,  it  is  not  enough.  It 
is  not  enough  for  any  one,  for  any  man,  for  Jesus 
or  for  God  himself.  Somewhere  in  that  path  of 
teaching,  of  saving,  of  leading,  friendship  must 


142  THIS  MIND 

come  out  to  crown  it  all  or  they  have  all  missed 
the  perfect  result.  Life  service  in  the  school,  in 
the  j)ulpit,  in  medicine,  in  politics,  in  missions, 
in  business,  in  farming;  life  service  for  Jesus,  life 
service  for  any  of  us  must  come  at  last  to  this. 
There  are  many  glad  hours  in  the  life  of  a  teacher 
or  a  preacher  or  a  physician.  The  mental 
awakening  of  a  student,  the  spiritual  expansion 
of  a  convert,  the  renewed  health  of  a  patient — 
these  are  rew^ards  beyond  all  computation.  But 
when  teacher  or  preacher  or  physician  discovers 
that  friendship  has  come  out  of  service  he  knows 
the  high  rapture  that  Jesus  knew  when  he  ran 
up  that  flag  and  w^aved  it  in  the  face  of  the  world. 
Some  day  the  w^orld  will  find  out  the  meaning  of 
religion  as  friendship,  its  meaning  for  God  and 
men,  and  when  the  world  finds  that  out,  the 
light  of  a  new  morning  will  be  in  the  sky  and  in 
the  hearts  of  men. 

Sixth  :  Finally,  this  mind  toward  other  persons 
works  out  and  will  especially  work  out  in  the 
life  time  of  those  now  young,  into  those  large 
areas  that  we  call  race  relations  in  the  Avorld 
near  and  far.  The  youth  of  to-day  are  making 
their  life  decisions  at  a  time  w^hen  world  relation- 
ships are  out  in  the  front.  I  think  I  decided  to 
enter  the  ministry  forty  years  ago  without  even 
thinking  that  my  ministry  would  have  anything 
except  a   local   significance  or   mean   anything 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS         143 

much  except  to  the  congregations  and  towns  to 
which  it  might  lead  me.  It  did  not  occur  to  me 
that  I  would  have  or  would  need  anything  except 
an  academic,  long-range,  missionary  attitude  to- 
ward the  Chinese,  the  Japanese,  or  the  Negroes. 
Such  an  attitude  would  be  almost  impossible  to- 
day. One  might  expect  to-day  that  all  his  life  he 
would  teach  or  preach  or  farm  in  Indiana,  but 
in  making  such  a  decision  he  would  be  conscious 
that,  no  matter  where  he  taught  or  preached  or 
farmed,  he  Avould  be  in  vital  contact  with  race 
problems,  class  problems,  national  relationships 
and  world  relationships.  Whether  one  chooses 
it  or  not,  the  race  question,  for  example,  crowds 
into  his  school  room  or  his  church  or  trips  him 
in  the  furrow  that  he  is  trying  to  plow.  Even 
our  self-centered,  isolated  country,  that  never  in- 
tended such  a  thing  at  all,  has  got  caught  in  the 
world-welter  and  is  all  mixed  up  not  with  simple 
reds,  whites,  and  blues,  but  with  blacks,  browns, 
and  yellows.  And  the  men  who  are  working 
over  problems  of  international  economics,  inter- 
national disarmament,  new  boundaries  and  new 
maps,  whether  they  fully  realize  it  or  not  are 
really  in  this  human  race-welter  that  cannot  be 
escaped.  Now,  it  is  no  part  of  this  study  to  go 
into  the  race  or  international  problem.  What 
we  are  thinking  of  lies  earlier  than  that.  We  are 
thinking  of  that  mind  toward  other  persons  that 


144  THIS  MIND 

in  our  life  purpose  and  life  decision  we  are  going 
to  carry  into  and  through  our  lives.  For  we 
shall  not  be  able  to  help  a  bit  unless  we  have  the 
right  mind  on  these  questions. 

Elsewhere,  speaking  for  my  colleagues,  I  have 
made  statements  some  of  which  in  substance  are 
repeated  here.  (See  Bishops'  Address  to  the 
General  Conference  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal 
Church  for  1920.)  The  world  is  not  a  white 
man's  world,  the  Christian  Church  is  not  a  white 
man's  church.  The  races  of  the  world  have  been 
thrown  together  by  the  World  War  as  never  be- 
fore. It  is  now  necessary  to  make  right  human 
relations  or  the  next  war  will  be  a  race  conflict 
that  will  destroy  civilization.  And  we  must  not 
wait  as  we  did  about  the  World  War  until  the 
crash  comes  and  then  rush  in  to  save  what  we 
can  out  of  the  wreck.  The  generation  in  which 
the  college  men  and  women  of  to-day  will  do  their 
work  must  do  better  than  any  other  generation 
has  done,  better  than  all  generations  have  done, 
or  the  world  is  likely  to  do  worse.  The  gospel 
of  catastrophe  has  utterly  failed.  The  gospel  of 
construction  must  be  tried  or  the  world  will  be 
ruined. 

You  must,  therefore,  bring  to  this  issue  a 
mind  free  from  race  prejudice,  race  narrowness, 
race  snobbishness,  and  race  hatred.  That  will 
be  more  than  your  fathers  and  mothers  did,  but 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS  U5 

if  jou  only  do  as  well  as  they  have  done,  you  will 
do  much  worse  than  they  did.  Men  are  still 
talking  of  superior  races  and  inferior  races,  rul- 
ing races  and  subject  races,  races  born  to  conquer 
and  races  born  to  be  conquered.  And  for  the 
life  of  me  I  cannot  see  that  the  mind  of  Christ 
runs  that  wa}'.  Xor  can  I  see  that  any  life 
decision  made  on  that  basis  and  worked  out  in 
that  spirit  could  possibly  be  a  Christian  decision 
or  work  out  a  Christian  result.  The  application 
of  the  mind  of  Christ  is  not  easy,  will  not  be 
easy,  but  it  is  ten  times  as  easy  in  the  long  run 
— and,  I  think,  in  the  short  run — as  the  applica- 
tion of  any  other  mind  to  this  question.  And  we 
cannot  have  his  mind  toward  ourselves  and  to- 
Avard  the  people  we  like  and  admire,  unless  we 
also  have  it  toward  all  the  people  whose  blood 
is  red.  You  cannot  do  crooked  thinking  here  and 
come  out  straight.  And  there  is  only  one  road 
to  the  kingdom  of  peace  in  this  world  or  the  next, 
and  that  is  a  straight  road.  We  must  make  our 
life  decision  with  the  determination  to  have  the 
mind  of  Christ  clear  through  this  and  all  other 
human  problems.  This  is  the  big  one,  so  big 
that  no  previous  generation  has  even  half  way 
solved  it;  so  big  that  very  eminent  men  have 
declared  that  it  could  not  be  solved.  Are  you 
going  to  sit  by  the  fire  warming  yourself  feeling 
that  there  is  something  too  big  for  you?     Are 


146  THIS  MIND 

you  going  to  go  on,  half  trying  or  not  trying  at 
all,  doubting,  despairing,  talking  like  a  pessimist, 
hoping  that  somehow  the  crash  will  not  come  in 
your  time?  Are  you  going  to  go  into  your  life 
endeavor  with  a  philosophy  that  has  always 
failed,  the  philosophy  of  ''lesser  breeds  without 
the  law,"  inferior  castes,  and  "white  man's 
burdens"?  Do  you  read  history  to  any  good 
purpose  at  all?  If  so,  you  must  see  that  Judaism 
broke  down — as  every  kind  of  Judaism  always 
does — because  it  was  not  human  clear  through. 
It  wrecked  itself  as  such  philosophy  always  does, 
no  matter  whether  it  bears  one  name  or  another, 
whether  it  talks  Hebrew,  or  Japanese,  or  German 
or  English,  whether  it  has  black  hair  or  white 
hair,  or  no  hair,  because  it  could  not  carry  the 
weight  of  its  own  degrading  sense  of  its  own 
superiority  and  special  privilege.  No  race,  no 
nation,  no  person  can  carry  that  weight  along 
with  its  natural  burden  of  duty. 

We  have  got  to  have  the  mind  of  Christ  clear 
through  this  problem  and  clear  round  the  world. 
"We  cannot  get  right  relations  between  races 
out  of  wrong  conceptions  of  races  or  wrong 
spirit  toward  them."  We  cannot  save  the  mind 
of  Christ  for  anything  unless  we  use  it  and  apply 
it  to  everything.  Did  you  read  this  bit  of 
verse  that  President  King  quotes  in  one  of 
his  books? — 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS         147 

"Proue  in  the  road  he  lay, 
Wounded  and  sore  bested ; 
Priests,  Levites  passed  that  way, 
And  turned  aside  the  head. 
They  were  not  hardened  men 

In  human  service  slack : 
His  need  was  great :  but  then 

His  face,  you  see,  was  black." 

You  feel  at  once  that  this  is  not  according  to  the 
mind  of  Christ,  and  that  no  one  can  be  a  true 
priest  to  humanity  if  he  has  this  mind  toward 
any  part  of  humanity.  For,  you  see,  the  world 
in  which  your  life  decisions  will  work  out  in  life 
service  is  a  world  of  many  colors  and  races. 
Some  of  them  are  clearly  less  attractive  than 
others.  It  is  easy  to  make  perfectly  true  criti- 
cisms of  some  of  them.  It  is  all  too  easy  not 
to  like  them,  all  too  easy  not  to  believe  much 
in  them,  all  too  easy  to  be  acutely  conscious  of 
their  defects  and  faults.  But  for  3^ou  and  all 
other  college  men  and  women  to-day  the  supreme 
question  is  not  whether  some  of  those  unlovely 
races  have  the  mind  of  Christ  but  Avhether  in  your 
life  decision  and  life  endeavor  you  have  and  will 
have  it.  Your  relation  to  this  many-colored 
world  is  to  be  like  his,  a  sacrificial,  redemptive 
relation.  Like  him  even  in  the  presence  of  the 
least  attractive  group  you  must  keep  your  pro- 
nouns straight  and  declare  as  he  did,  "For  their 
sakes,  that  they  may  come  to  their  own,  I  offer 


148  THIS  MIND 

myself.''  Of  course,  this  is  ideal,  but  unless 
ideals  are  to  perish  in  the  world,  we  must  pre- 
serve them.  Christianity  has  never  been  fully 
tried  in  its  bearing  upon  race  and  class  relations. 
It  remains  for  us  to  try  it,  not  with  doubt  and 
fear,  certainly  not  partially,  but  wholly  and 
perfectly.  This  is  the  next,  the  immediate  adven- 
ture of  the  Church  of  Christ.  The  issue  between 
the  races  will  be  fought  out  or,  in  this  mind, 
worked  out.  If  it  is  left  to  be  fought  out,  there 
will  be  nothing  left  of  the  civilization  achieved 
by  the  centuries.  If  it  is  worked  out  as  it  can 
be,  the  kingdom  of  Christ  may  be  established  in 
the  earth  before  your  sun  goes  down.  It  is  a 
glorious  thing  to  be  alive  now  and  to  be  young. 
Foolish  men  say  that  the  idealism  with  which 
we  went  into  the  war  is  all  gone.  Other  foolish 
men  even  call  those  ideals  iridescent  dreams  and 
call  upon  men  now  to  get  down  to  practical  com- 
mon sense.  Visions  are  in  the  discard  in  many 
circles.  But  from  all  the  battlefields  where  our 
dead  lie  buried  comes  the  cry,  as  Alfred  Noyes 
said :  "It  was  for  visions  that  we  fell.''  I  repeat 
here  words  spoken  elsewhere : 

"Shall  we  not  now  be  'swift  of  soul  and  jubilant 
of  feet'  to  make  a  world  without  a  race  war,  not 
in  some  far  future  when  we  are  dead,  but  now? 
The  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at  hand.  Let  us  repent 
therefore  of  race  pride,  race  prejudice,  and  race 


TOWxVRD  OTHER  PERSONS  U9 

bitterness;  repent  in  America,  repent  in  Asia, 
repent  in  Africa,  repent  in  Europe.  The  king- 
dom of  heaven  is  at  hand.  This  is  our  gospel. 
We  will  not  lose  heart  in  it.  Blood  is  thicker 
than  water,  and  the  human  family  is  of  one  blood. 
We  will  labor  everywhere  to  make  a  unity  of 
spirit  in  the  races  of  the  whole  world. 

^'The  final  impact  of  races  and  nations  upon 
one  another  has  not  yet  come.  Thoughtful  men 
everywhere  are  dreading  and  even  fearing  it. 
If  that  impact  is  to  be  military,  then  let  us  brace 
ourselves  to  wind  up  the  world  shortly  by  war. 
If  it  is  to  be  commercial,  then  let  us  resign  our- 
selves to  a  vulgar  and  debasing  reign  of  material- 
ism and  wealth,  with  the  sun  of  the  Spirit  gone 
down  in  the  lives  of  men.  If  the  impact  is  to  be 
economic,  then  let  us  surrender  our  evangel  of 
love  and  redemption,  and  join  the  new  crusade 
for  economic  regeneration  and  supremacy." 

What  is  the  deep,  final  meaning  of  the  presence 
of  Chinese,  Japanese,  and  other  students  in  such 
numbers  in  American  colleges?  What  is  the 
real  meaning  of  the  Rhodes  Scholarships  at  Ox- 
ford University?  What  is  the  actual  significance 
of  such  movements  as  the  World  Student  Federa- 
tion? Let  us  not  allow  a  supreme  and  manifest 
providence  go  by  without  our  seeing  it.  The 
undergraduates  of  to-day  and  the  graduates  of 
yesterday  will  be  leading  the  nations  to-morrow. 


150  THIS  MIND 

Men  and  women  who  have  studied  together, 
played  together,  and  prayed  together  on  a  hun- 
dred campuses,  or  who  are  now  doing  all  that  can 
make  a  world  brotherhood  of  understanding,  a 
w^orld  brotherhood  of  power,  a  world  fellowship 
of  service  and  consecration  of  such  strength  as 
with  the  living  Christ  can  create  a  new  outlook, 
a  new  motive,  a  new  character  among  men.  If 
the  students  of  to-day  in  all  these  lands  and  from 
all  these  lands  maintain  such  contact  with  Jesus 
Christ  that  they  get  his  passion  for  the  ideal,  his 
passion  for  perfection,  his  passion  for  sacrifice 
and  altruism,  his  passion  for  humanity  as  a 
whole;  if  these  students  of  to-day  get  for  all 
men  the  mind  that  was  in  him  toward  all  men, 
the  kingdom  of  heaven  will  come  farther  in  their 
life  time  than  it  has  in  all  the  Christian  centuries. 
College  men  and  women  from  all  these  lands 
and  in  all  these  lands  are  making  their  life  deci- 
sions to-day  in  the  presence  of  the  possible 
answer  to  Christ's  prayer  for  the  Kingdom's 
coming  while  their  decisions  are  working  out 
with  him  in  life. 

For  twenty  years  in  a  Southern  newspaper 
every  Saturday  this  notice  is  said  to  have 
appeared,  heading  the  regular  list  of  church 
services.      The  announcement  never  varies : 

"On  Sunday  morning  at  his  church,  and  on 
Sunday  afternoon  at  the  chain  gang,  the  Rev- 


TOWARD  OTHER  PERSONS         151 

erend  Charles  Jaggers  will  preach  from  his  usual 
text." 

The  announcement  is  always  the  same,  and 
the  text  always  the  same:  ^'Let  this  mind  be  in 
you  which  was  also  in  Christ  Jesus." 

Let  me  gather  up  what  I  have  tried  to  say : 

All  vital  questions  are,  at  last,  personal. 

Every  calling  must  be  tested  by  its  meaning  for 
personality. 

All  our  life  decisions  and  life  purposes  must 
be  intensely  human. 

You  cannot  humanize  your  decision  and  work 
it  out  except  by  a  sustained  and  Christlike  effort 
to  Christianize  the  order  in  which  your  calling 
places  you. 

This  must  be  done  and  can  be  done  by  the 
men  and  women  within  a  given  order. 

You  must  carry  into  your  decision  and  work 
Christ's  sense  of  human  values. 

Your  decision  must  work  out  as  Jesus'  did  on 
the  basis  of  an  equal  interest  in  people  who  differ 
greatly  from  one  another,  and  must  find  its  real 
expression  in  the  religion  of  friendship. 

And  your  decisions  to-day  have  a  w^orld  mean- 
ing. 

You  must,  therefore,  bring  to  your  life  deci- 
sions the  mind  of  Christ  as  to  races  and  nations, 
their  character  and  their  relations.  Once  more 
Jesus  is  saying,  "Repent,  change  your  attitudes, 


152  THIS  MIND 

the  kingdom  of  a  new  and  better  order  is  at 
hand/'  The  youth  in  college  to-day  will  have  a 
chance  to  make  a  new  earth  such  as  no  other 
youth  have  had  since  that  other  one  ascended. 
This  is  the  gleam.    After  it,  follow  it. 


VI 


THIS  MIND  TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL 
TESTS 

When  an  early  and  very  able  letter-writer 
wrote  to  some  early  Thessalonians,  a  tribe  not 
yet  wholly  extinct,  he  said  some  things  that  bear 
directly  to-day  upon  our  study.  Seeing  that  they 
were  liable  to  look  at  everything  from  the  purely 
practical,  material  viewpoint,  he  said  to  them : 
''Do  not  extinguish  the  fire  of  the  Spirit.  Let  it 
burn  steadily."  Seeing  that  they  were  liable  to 
think  themselves  at  the  beginning  of  an  era,  and 
no  longer  to  need  the  voices  and  counsels  of  the 
past,  the  teaching  of  the  ages,  or  the  prophetic 
element  in  life,  he  wrote :  "Despise  not  prophesy- 
ings.  Do  not  get  proud  and  think  the  past  can 
teach  you  nothing.  And  do  not  let  the  prophetic 
note  die  among  you."  Seeing  that  they  were 
likely  to  apply  false  tests,  unreal  and  purely  aca- 
demic tests  to  their  new  experiences,  their  new  in- 
spirations, their  new  teachings,  he  said  to  them : 
'Trove  all  these  things  by  bringing  them  to  the 
test  of  life.  Then  hold  fast  to  the  things  that 
are  actually  found  good  for  life." 

153 


154  THIS  MIND 

In  these  sentences  Saint  Paul  forces  us  up  to 
essential  tests  and  literally  cuts  the  ground  from 
under  scores  of  philosophies  and  theories.  Bring 
everything  to  the  severe,  living  test  of  reality,  the 
reality  of  the  years,  the  reality  that  an  immortal 
personality  has  the  right  to  demand.  No  matter 
about  the  tests  of  novelty  or  of  interest,  or  even 
of  formal  logic.  The  test  of  life  is  the  supreme 
and  final  test.  Is  it  good  to  live  by?  Bring 
everything  to  that.  Then  hold  fast  to  what  is 
found  to  be  good  for  life.  No  matter  what  other 
values  a  vision  or  a  teaching,  a  philosoph}^  or  a 
theology  may  have,  if  it  is  not  good  for  life,  it 
does  not  possess  the  final,  highest  good.  I  once 
read  a  statement  from  John  Ruskin  to  this  effect, 
not  pretending  that  it  is  an  exact  quotation : 
"If  the  ghost  that  is  in  you  leaves  your  tongue 
the  tongue  of  a  liar,  your  hand  the  hand  of  a 
juggler,  and  your  heart  the  heart  of  a  cheat,  then 
be  assured  it  is  no  holy  ghost.''  In  other  words, 
our  life  decisions  must  meet  all  these  real  vital 
tests.  In  view  of  the  manifest  immorality  of 
certain  religions  as  seen  in  their  practices,  I  do 
not  see  how  an  honest  youth  can  ever  make  a 
decision  to  enter  their  service.  They  are  not  good 
for  life.  That  makes  them  impossible.  Your 
life  decision  must  bear  the  test  of  life  or  you  are 
ruined  even  as  you  make  it. 

We  cannot  determine  things  like  this  wholly 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     155 

by  hard  common  sense.  When  a  man  says  that 
he  speaks  as  a  plain  business  man,  he  usually 
means  that  as  modestly  as  possible  he  is  really 
saying  the  last  word  on  the  subject.  And  that 
might  be  true  in  purely  business  matters.  But 
it  is  not  likely  to  be  true  at  all  in  regions  where 
spiritual  insight,  spiritual  vision,  and  a  sense 
of  personal,  ethical  values  count  for  a  good  deal 
more  than  commercial  accuracy. 

We  are  inclined  also  to  complicate  our  life 
decisions  by  giving  undue  and  unfruitful  atten- 
tion to  unreal  and  hypothetical  questions  that 
really  do  not  bear  upon  the  matter.  A  plain  man 
was  once  a  candidate  for  appointment  under 
the  civil  service  rules  as  a  night  watchman  in 
a  government  building.  One  of  the  examination 
questions  was :  "How  far  is  the  sun  from  the 
earth?"  The  man  replied,  "I  do  not  know,  but 
I  think  it  is  not  near  enough  to  prevent  me  from 
filling  this  job  of  night  watchman  if  I  can  get  it." 
A  good  many  questions  are  interesting  but  do 
not  bear  very  directly  on  the  question  of  your 
lifework.  For  example,  there  is  the  question  of 
the  age  of  the  world,  the  length  of  time  it  took 
to  make  it,  and  how  it  was  made,  whether  in 
longer  or  shorter  time.  One  would  really  like 
to  know  the  answer,  and  in  making  up  a  final 
philosophy  of  the  universe,  one  is  likely  to  come 
to  some  conclusion  that  will  fit  in  with  the  rest 


156  THIS  MIND 

of  his  views,  but  such  questions  are  not  su- 
premely important  unless  we  are  going  to  make 
worlds  as  a  life  occupation.  A  first-class  teacher 
ought  not  to  be  wrecked  over  questions  with 
which  he  is  actually  not  going  to  be  much  con- 
cerned. No  man  ought  to  allow  himself  to  be 
kept  out  of  the  kingdom  of  high  opportunity  be- 
cause of  a  speculative  interest  in  a  kingdom  with 
which  he  has  no  real  doings.  Those  decisions  are 
most  genuine  and  wise  which  meet  and  answer 
the  largest  number  of  life's  vital  questions,  even 
though  for  the  time  they  leave  a  lot  of  others 
untouched.  And  that  person  is  most  useful  to 
us  who  gives  us  in  his  own  life  actual  personal 
light  on  the  largest  number  of  these  real  ques- 
tions which  must  be  answered  if  any  life  is  to 
be  strong,  rich,  and  steady. 

For  a  moment,  then,  let  us  leave  to  our  argu- 
ing ancestors  all  these  questions  about  the  age  of 
the  world,  the  method  of  creation,  the  origin  of 
evil,  which  are  important  in  their  place,  but  not 
in  this  place,  while  we  face  our  own  life  decisions 
on  another  basis,  on  our  own  basis.  Life  is  going 
to  be  hard  enough  without  dragging  into  it  any- 
thing that  does  not  belong  there.  We  do  not 
want  it  to  be  complicated  with  any  artificial, 
unreal,  or  largely  imaginary  issues.  We  w^ant  a 
right  relation  to  the  past,  but  we  want  also  a 
working  relation  to  the  present  and  future.    We 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     157 

recognize  two  principles,  the  principle  of  con- 
tinuity and  the  principle  of  progress.  Neither 
shall  dominate  us.  We  will  hold  on  to  what  the 
centuries  have  shown  to  be  good  for  life.  We 
will  go  forward  to  a  larger,  ampler  life  than 
the  centuries  have  reached.  We  will  be  respect- 
ful, but  we  will  not  be  slaves.  Above  all,  in  the 
presence  of  that  Other  One,  who  was  at  Nazareth 
that  day  when  he  was  at  the  opening  of  his 
career,  we  will  be  real,  we  will  be  obedient  to  the 
highest,  and  we  will  be  whole-hearted  as  he  was. 
Our  fathers  never  seemed  to  know  quite  how  to 
make  the  most  of  him.  They  worshiped  him,  but 
never  seemed  quite  sure  that  a  workaday  world 
could  be  run  on  his  lines.  We  are  going  to  try 
it  on  his  basis.  We  are  going  the  whole  length 
with  him,  on  his  lines,  with  his  truth,  on  his 
methods.  We  have  seen  too  many  centuries 
mixed  with  compromise  in  vital  matters.  We 
would  like  to  see  one  unhesitatingly  going  his 
way  with  him.  The  dangerous  heresies  of  past 
and  present  do  not  seem  to  us  what  they  seem  to 
be  and  to  have  been  to  so  many.  To  us  the  most 
dangerous,  the  most  fatal  heresy  is  the  doubt  as 
to  whether  a  modern  young  man  or  woman  can 
absolutely  go  Jesus'  way  with  him,  can  make  him 
the  rule  of  life  decision  and  life  service.  We  are 
about  to  make  our  life  decisions  and  offer  our- 
selves to  the  Lord  of  our  dav-     Let  us  do  it  in 


158  THIS  MIND 

obedience  to  these  convictions  and  submit  our 
purpose  to  these  tests  among  others : 

1.  Can  you  in  this  life  you  propose,  at  the 
beginning  and  to  the  end,  hold  steady  with  the 
highest  ideals?  Practical  men  say  it  cannot  be 
done.  Moral  idealism  and  personal  integrity 
say  that  it  must  be  done.  Life  is  not  worth  the 
struggle  unless  one  can  maintain  ''truth  in  his 
inward  parts/'  and  carry  his  flag  aloft  as  he 
crosses  the  world's  market  place.  If  we  have 
to  compromise  at  this  point,  we  might  just  as 
well  give  up  and  let  the  deluge  of  compromise 
and  low  ideals  sweep  over  us.  John  Stuart 
Mill,  no  fanatic  surely,  declared  there  was  noth- 
ing better  than  "so  to  live  that  Christ  would 
approve  our  life."  And  the  practical  man,  look- 
ing at  things  as  they  are,  familiar  with  the  long, 
sad  centuries  of  surrendered  ideals  and  compro- 
mised principles,  using  what  he  calls  his  com- 
mon sense,  says  it  cannot  be  done.  He  says  the 
fires  of  original  passion  cannot  be  kept  burning, 
that  slackness  will  get  into  the  blood,  and  moral 
enthusiasm  will  die  in  the  heart.  That  is  the 
answer  of  the  practical  man  who  has  lived 
through  the  dull,  gray  years  until  the  glow  has 
gone  off  from  life.  And  if  I  had  nothing  else 
than  that  to  say  to  you,  I  would  not  say  that. 
That  is  no  gospel  to  the  youth  of  any  age.  The 
good  news  for  youth  is  that  the  kingdom  of  the 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     159 

best  life  is  at  hand,  that  it  is  going  to  walk 
around  on  campus  and  street.  Jesus  is  the 
answer  to  that  question  about  maintaining  ideals. 
I  trust  him  and  his  opinion  more  than  I  do 
the  man  on  the  street.  Jesus  did  it.  He  is  the 
answer.  He  tried  it  and  it  worked.  His  opinion 
is  worth  its  full  face  value. 

2.  Can  you  in  this  life  you  propose  hold  fast 
to  a  life  of  truth  even  though  it  involves  your 
own  life  and  the  life  of  and  loss  of  your  friends? 
We  easily  get  this  confused  with  the  question  of 
intellectual  freedom  which  is  so  precious  in  it- 
self and  so  often  utterly  abused.  The  right  to 
search  freely  for  truth  w^herever  it  can  be  found, 
the  right  to  hold  the  truth  and  to  speak  it  in 
love  whenever  it  is  found  must  be  held  at  all 
cost.  But  many  men  exhaust  their  interest  in 
truth  in  the  fascinating  search  for  it,  while 
others  take  their  supreme  joy  in  the  display  or 
proclamation  of  the  truth  they  think  they  have 
found,  especially  if  they  think  no  one  else  has 
found  it,  sometimes  without  any  care  for  human 
consequences.  Of  course  you  know  how  far  from 
the  real  life  of  truth  this  is.  Truth  is  a  thing 
to  be  discovered,  not  at  all  forgetting  that  a 
good  deal  of  it  has  already  been  discovered; 
always  a  thing  to  be  believed  in  one's  heart  and 
held  there  with  joy;  always  a  thing  to  be  thought 
in  one's  mind  and  to  be  made  the  law  of  one's 


160  THIS  MIND 

thinking;  always  a  thing  to  be  done  and  to  be 
made  the  law  of  one's  living.  The  woe  that  falls 
upon  those  who  know  the  truth  and  do  it  not 
is  a  deserved  woe.  The  desire  for  freedom  is 
not  always  the  same  as  the  truthful  attitude  of 
mind,  the  acceptance  of  truth  for  life  and  its 
guidance  on  life's  way.  Nor  is  love  of  truth  in 
one  direction  always  accompanied  by  love  of 
truth  in  all  directions.  For  your  purposes,  to- 
day, knowledge  of  the  truth  as  it  is  in  Jesus  is 
the  supreme  thing.  Truth  as  it  is  in  the  rocks, 
truth  as  it  is  in  the  plant,  truth  as  it  is  in  the 
philosophy,  are  all  on  the  way,  and  only  on  the 
way,  to  truth  as  it  is  in  the  personality.  And  the 
compromising,  prudent  man  on  the  street  doubts 
the  possibility  of  holding  fast  in  a  man's  life  to 
the  truth.  It  leads  so  far,  it  costs  so  much,  it 
so  involves  one's  friends,  and,  if  carried  to  full 
length,  it  causes  their  defection.  This  is  a  prac- 
tical world,  he  says,  and  one  must  neither 
attempt  nor  expect  too  much.  Does  not  the 
Bible  itself  tell  us  not  to  be  righteous  over- 
much? Well,  the  answer  to  the  whole  question 
of  living  by  the  truth  is  that  Jesus  did  it.  He 
did  not  bluster  nor  pose,  nor  make  himself  a 
martyr  to  freedom  of  thinking,  nor  set  himself 
up  as  superior,  but  the  law  of  truth  was  in  his 
life,  the  word  of  truth  always  on  his  lips.  He 
bore  witness  to  the  truth  in  all  that  he  said, 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     161 

all  that  he  did,  all  that  he  was,  and  at  last  all 
that  he  suffered.  He  did  everything  with  truth 
except  doubt  it,  abandon  it,  compromise  it,  lower 
it,  or  weaken  it.  He  is  the  answer  to  the  whole 
question.  When  you  are  making  a  life  decision 
there  is  no  answer  except  the  personal  one. 
Until  some  better  attitude  to  truth  can  be  found 
than  Jesus'  life  gives  us,  let  us  go  with  him. 

3.  In  making  and  pursuing  a  life  decision  can 
a  man  keep  his  faith  in  doing  good,  his  enthu- 
siasm for  doing  good,  in  the  face  of  actual  defec- 
tions and  genuine  failures,  right  at  the  heart  of 
his  endeavor? 

Nothing  is  much  harder  than  this.  Some  day, 
after  years  of  patient,  self-denying  labor  for 
some  group,  they  may  all  turn  away  and  leave 
you.  Or  after  long  effort  you  will  apparently 
have  nothing  to  show  for  what  you  have  done. 
You  may  try  to  lift  some  lowly  people,  to  teach 
a  backw^ard  race,  to  reform  a  criminal  group,  or 
to  uplift  a  degraded  community.  You  may  think 
you  are  making  at  least  a  measure  of  success  out 
of  it,  and  awaken  some  morning  with  the  sicken- 
ing discovery  that  the  w^hole  thing  has  to  be  done 
all  over  again,  and  the  more  sickening  doubt 
w^hether  it  can  be  done  at  all,  whether  the  effort 
is  worth  while.  This  is  the  fate  and  experience 
of  men  who  try.  Just  when  you  think  you  have 
got  people  free  from  the  world's  pollutions,  they 


162  THIS  MIND 

get  entangled  and  overpowered  again,  and  their 
last  state  is  worse  than  the  first.  They  see  the 
way  of  righteousness  and  then  turn  back.  The 
biblical  figure  of  the  dog  and  the  hog  is  not  very 
nice  but  wholly  accurate.  And  when  one  of  your 
converts  or  pupils  falls  away  and  goes  clear 
back  to  the  old  ways,  you  are  liable  to  touch  zero 
in  your  enthusiasm  and  to  use  foolish  words, 
saying  that  a  dog  is  always  a  dog  anyhow,  and  it 
is  no  use  to  try  to  do  anything.  And  maybe 
you  will  say  it  about  people — black  people,  red 
people,  yellow  people;  people  who  speak  some 
other  tongue  than  your  own;  people  whom  you 
have  carried  until  your  back  has  almost  broken. 
When  that  bitter  hour  comes  it  will  have  many 
elements  of  bitterness,  but  no  other  quite  so 
bitter  as  the  feeling  that  your  whole  life  pur- 
pose, was  a  blunder.  You  will  say  about  the 
saddest  words  men  ever  speak  in  this  world  of 
ours :  "What  is  the  use  of  trying?'' 

Now,  it  is  wonderful  to  see  how  far  that  ques- 
tion went  toward  answer  in  Jesus'  own  expe- 
rience. He  met  it,  met  it  as  tragically  as  any  one 
of  you  ever  will.  He  lost  the  rich  young  man, 
w^ho  flinched  and  failed  when  he  had  the  chance 
to  back  Jesus  with  everything  he  had.  Many  of 
the  disciples  turned  back  to  their  old  lives.  His 
own  people  rejected  him.  They  failed  to  grasp 
his  teaching,  they  missed  the  point  of  his  real 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     163 

mission,  they  utterly  misunderstood  him.  Tested 
by  our  conventional  standards,  his  immediate, 
visible  success  was  not  very  great.  I  can  easily 
imagine  his  heaviness  of  heart  as  he  faced  his 
experiences.  And  I  can  easily  see  where  a 
weaker  spirit  would  have  broken  and  let  the 
whole  enterprise  go.  But  I  really  count  that  a 
superficial  view  of  Jesus.  He  had  the  deeper, 
finer  insight,  the  insight  that  gave  him  steadi- 
ness, that  must  give  us  steadiness.  The  final 
test  is  not  the  winning  but  the  trying,  though 
winning  is  desirable.  The  highest  success  is  not 
receiving  the  palm  but  running  the  straight  race. 
The  thing  Jesus  did  was  worth  doing  even  though 
no  one  followed  him.  The  things  he  said  were 
worth  sa;y*ing  even  though  no  one  believed  them. 
His  cross  was  worth  carrying  even  though  he  had 
to  carry  it  alone.  It  is  better  to  have  tried  like 
this  and  failed  than  never  to  have  tried.  That 
is  the  only  real  failure.  And  if  you  are  going 
into  a  lifework  where  you  will  require  manifest 
success  all  the  time  to  keep  up  your  heart  and 
spirit  in  it,  then  be  assured  it  is  no  highest  life- 
work. 

I  said  a  moment  ago  that  I  could  easily  im- 
agine his  heaviness  of  heart,  hear  the  break  in 
his  voice,  could  easily  see  where  a  weaker  spirit 
would  have  let  go.  If  that  were  all  I  could  see, 
it  Avould  make  me  ashamed  of  my  own  insight 


164  THIS  MIND 

into  his  life.  The  real  vision  here  is  of  that 
true  person  never  wavering  as  to  the  worth  of  his 
work,  never  losing  heart  in  it  even  when  it 
apparently  went  badly,  knowing  that  it  was 
worth  doing  in  itself,  knowing  that  his  words 
were  worth  saying,  no  matter  about  the  popular 
vote.  He  wanted  success,  longed  for  followers, 
rejoiced  in  believers.  He  wept  when  Jerusalem 
refused  his  offers.  He  wept  but  did  not  waver  or 
grow  bitter.  It  hurt  when  he  lost  disciples.  It 
hurt  but  did  not  sour  or  harden  his  spirit,  or 
cause  him  to  throw  away  his  ideals  in  service. 
He  kept  his  faith  in  doing  good,  his  enthusiasm 
for  doing  good,  in  the  face  of  losses  and  defec- 
tions. It  can  be  done.  He  is  the  answer  to 
your  question.  Years  hence  when  in  China  or 
Chicago,  in  Terre  Haute  or  Illinois,  in  ministry, 
medicine,  law  or  farming,  your  simple  faith  in 
doing  good  is  threatened,  look  back  at  the  story 
of  that  Other  One,  who  never  lost  that  faith, 
and  hold  on  even  when  all  the  tides  seem  running 
out.  It  can  be  done.  He  is  the  answer  to  that 
question.  He  is  the  proof  and  the  example. 
What  essential  difference  does  our  success  or 
failure  make  to  us?  We  may  not  enter  the  land 
of  promise,  as  Moses  did  not.  But  we  can  lead 
the  people  in  the  right  direction  all  our  lives, 
always  from  bondage,  always  toward  freedom. 
We  can  fight  all  the  time  in  the  good  fight.    We 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     165 

can  give  our  lives  all  the  while  to  the  high  human 
enterprise.  He  did  it.  We  can  do  it.  If  we  do 
this  as  he  did,  we  can  keep  our  heads  in  the  face 
either  of  a  crowd's  applause  or  a  crowd's  dis- 
approval. 

4.  Will  your  life  decision  and  the  life  service 
that  follows  it  give  youth  its  highest  chance  for 
character  and  service  in  the  world?  Youth  is 
not  wholly  a  matter  of  years.  There  are  some 
really  young  people  who  are  past  fifty.  They  are 
not  the  ones  who  are  always  asserting  their 
youth.  And  there  are  some  very  old  people  who 
are  under  thirty.  The  same  distinction  is  true 
concerning  the  modern  man.  He  is  not  modern 
just  because  he  says  so  or  just  because  he  is  alive 
to-day.  Yet,  in  the  main,  youth  does  in  large 
degree  have  reference  to  years,  even  though  it  is 
chiefly  a  thing  of  spirit  and  bearing.  The  work 
of  making  a  new  world  must  be  largely  done  if 
done  at  all  by  the  men  and  women  now  under 
thirty.  If  Jesus  Christ  does  not  get  his  chance 
with  them,  he  will  get  no  better  chance  than  he 
has  had  through  the  centuries  with  the  people 
who  have  got  the  world  into  its  present  mess. 

Now,  you  cannot  help  much  if  you  just  accept 
the  first  good  job  that  comes  along.  One  day 
they  offered  Jesus  the  job  of  being  king.  The 
short  view  which  so  many  take  would  have  led 
him  to  take  it.     Probably  all  the  familiar,  cus- 


166  THIS  MIND 

tomary,  specious  arguments  were  used  to  induce 
him  to  accept.  He  was  doubtless  told  that  this 
would  be  a  wonderful  chance  to  render  a  real 
service;  that  somebody  had  to  be  king  and  he 
could  prevent  some  bad  man  from  getting  the 
place ;  that  such  opportunities  did  not  come  often 
to  men  of  his  age,  and  would  not  likely  come 
again  to  him.  He  was  probably  told  how  many 
Messiahs  a  prosperous  king  could  support  and 
maintain.  You  know  or  will  know  the  whole 
list  of  plausible  reasons  for  doing  something  else 
than  the  thing  you  ought  to  do.  You  will  be 
swept  off  your  feet  unless  you  are  in  Jesus' 
spirit.  When  he  saw  the  thing  coming,  the  thing 
that  was  good  in  itself,  but  bad  for  him,  the 
thing  that  would  have  side-tracked  his  real  life 
purpose,  he  withdrew  from  the  crowd,  that  crowd 
that  turns  men's  heads  so  easily.  He  went  out 
to  the  low  mountain,  where  no  doubt  he  prayed 
it  all  over  again  and  came  back  to  go  on  with 
his  own  work. 

Nor  can  you  help  much  if  you  simply  bring 
youth's  usual  spirit  to  your  life  decision  and  pur- 
pose. In  youth  ambition  is  usually  the  compel- 
ling force,  success  the  goal  of  effort.  Let  us 
change  that  in  one  generation.  Phillips  Brooks 
asked  every  Harvard  man  to  give  the  world 
the  gift  of  yet  one  more  regenerated  human  life. 
What  shall  we  ask  and  receive  from  DePauw  to- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     167 

day?  Shall  we  look  for  less  than  one  more  life 
determining  itself  and  its  work  according  to  the 
mind  of  Christ?  An  old  teacher  said,  "Let  us 
learn  to  think  according  to  Christianity."  Let 
us  learn  to  think  according  to  Christ.  Away 
back  in  an  earlier  address  I  referred  to  Emer- 
son's advice  about  wagons  and  stars.  A  new  and 
real  interpretation  of  that  old  sentence  has  just 
appeared.  The  man  who  easily  quotes  it  usually 
thinks  it  means  ''aim  high/'  but  what  it  really 
does  mean  must  be  something  like  this :  Tie  your 
life  to  the  highest  powers.  ''Go  where  the  gods 
are  going.  Take  the  direction  of  all  good  men." 
Hitch  your  personal  life  to  the  noblest  and  best. 
Swing  into  the  current  with  Jesus  at  its  head, 
the  current  of  that  human  power  that  keeps  indi- 
vidual wagons  actually  going  and  carrying  their 
load.  One  day  an  educated  youth  looked  at 
Jesus  and  said,  "Master,  I  will  go  along  with 
you."  He  had  hitched  his  wagon  to  the  right 
star.  Everything  else  that  youth  has  hitched  up 
with  has  failed.  Half  gods,  semi-Christianity, 
partial  Christianity,  have  all  proved  unequal  to 
the  demand  made  by  youth's  real  wagons.  If 
you  are  to  get  anywhere,  tie  your  lives  to  Jesus 
so  tight  that  you  will  get  the  whole  upward  pull, 
the  whole  onward  pull  of  his  life  through  this 
rough  world.  Your  ancestors  have  tried  every- 
thing else.     A  few  have  tried  this.     Maybe  we 


168  THIS  MIND 

can  see  one  generation  going  with  him  in  its 
choices,  its  purposes,  and  its  objects.  If  we  do 
see  this,  we  shall  see  some  other  things  that  we 
are  not  looking  for.  Things  will  begin  in  a  new 
way  to  work  together  for  good  to  those  who  do 
this.  Those  who  have  responded  to  his  purpose 
will  find  that  they  have  his  aid  and  interest  in 
their  purposes. 

Something  more  is  called  for  from  youth  than 
revolt  and  revolution  against  the  old  order,  what 
Sir  Philip  Gibbs  calls  "the  old  Gang.''  The 
world  is  sufflciently  upset  now.  A  new  world  is 
needed,  not  a  new  and  greater  chaos  and  ruin. 
Here  are  these  precious  materials  lying  in  such 
disorder  about  us.  Here  are  false  principles 
enthroned,  true  principles  inverted,  good  and  bad 
principles,  good  and  bad  people,  all  mixed  up. 
It  is  an  awful  mess  and  superficially  I  do  not 
wonder  at  any  attitude  that  men  take.  Super- 
ficially, I  say,  I  do  not  wonder.  But  the  super- 
ficial view  is  not  the  sound  one.  You  do  not 
get  the  true  view  until  you  get  the  mind  of  Christ 
about  the  world  and  the  power  of  youth.  If 
it  were  not  for  him  and  his  view  of  this  present 
world  near  and  far,  I  fear  I  could  be  a  wild  revo- 
lutionist, a  hopeless  pessimist,  or  an  out-and-out 
materialist.  Maybe  not.  Maybe  just  the  hope 
of  there  being  such  a  Person  somewhere,  some 
time  would  hold  me.    For  his  is  the  saving  view 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     169 

of  a  world  that  is  hopeless  without  him.  Indeed, 
if  we  had  to  come  to  our  life  purpose  without 
him,  there  would  be  no  gospel  of  cheer,  only  a 
sullen  appeal  to  do  your  best  in  an  utterly 
gloomy  situation.  A  striking  little  poem 
appeared  in  a  recent  Harper's  Magazine  entitled 
"Voyages,'^  by  Ruth  Comfort  Mitchell  Young: 

"A  tired  old  doctor  died  to-day  and  a  baby  boy  was 

born — 
A  little  new  soul  that  was  pink  and  frail  and  a 

soul  that  was  gray  and  worn, 
And — halfway  here  and  halfway  there — 
On  a  white  high  hill  of  shining  air. 
They  met  and  passed  and  paused  to  speak  in  the 

flushed  and  hearty  dawn. 

"The  man  looked  down  at  the  soft,  small  thing  with 

wise  and  weary  eyes, 
And    the   little    chap    stared    back    at    him    with 

startled,  scared  surmise : 
And  then  he  shook  his  downy  head — 
^I  think  I  won't  be  born,'  he  said. 
'You  are  too  gray  and  sad  I'    He  shrank  from  the 

pathway  down  the  skies. 

"But  the  tired  old  doctor  roused  once  more  at  the 

battlecry  of  birth, 
And  there  was  memory  in  his  look  of  grief  and  toil 

and  mirth. 
'Go  on!'  he  said.     'It's  good — and  bad: 
It's  hard !    Go  on!    It's  ow^s,  my  lad !' 
He  stood  and  urged  him  out  of  sight,  down  to  the 

waiting  earth." 

I  think  a  thoughtful  person  in  college  this  year 


170  THIS  MIND 

looking  out  at  the  world  ahead  of  him  at  the 
weary  old  men  breaking  down  under  its  load 
might  say  with  the  child,  ^'J  think  I  won't  be 
born."  But  not  if  he  sees  and  hears  that  tired 
old  doctor,  who  may  perhaps  be  the  Great  Physi- 
cian who  has  had  enough  to  make  his  soul  gray 
and  worn.  If  the  new  graduate  hears  him  crying 
out: 

"Go  on,  it's  good — and  bad, 
It's  hard!     Go  on!    It's  ourSy  my  lad!" 

I  think  the  new  graduate  can  strike  into  the 
waiting  years  with  a  shout.  He  may  even  see 
that  this  is  a  fine  hour  in  human  history,  w^hen 
real  men  and  women  can  begin  to  make  a  new 
to-morrow.  For  that  is  at  once  the  privilege  and 
the  duty  of  youth.  If  youth  simply  lines  up 
with  the  old  forces,  and  ranges  itself  on  differ- 
ent sides  of  the  ruinous,  selfish  old  groups;  if 
it  gives  itself  over  to  the  perpetuation  of  the  old 
industrialism,  old  militarism,  old  divisions  and 
castes;  if  it  comes  in  to  renew  the  old  strife  or 
to  find  a  great  adventure  in  a  new  war,  then 
youth  will  destroy  civilization  instead  of  saving 
it.    Sir  Philip  Gibbs  writes : 

^'The  youth  of  the  new  world  that  is  coming 
need  have  no  fear  that  peace  will  rob  it  of 
romance  and  adventure.  The  building  of  that 
new  world  upon  the  ruins  of  the  old,  the  reshap- 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     171 

ing  of  social  relations  between  classes  and 
nations;  the  pursuit  of  spiritual  truth  and 
beauty,  the  killing  of  cruel  and  evil  powers ;  the 
conquest  of  disease,  the  resurrection  of  art  and 
poetry  and  lovely  handicrafts,  the  calling  back 
of  song  and  laughter  to  human  life,  the  joy  of 
flight  made  safe  from  death,  the  prolongation  of 
human  life  by  new  discoveries  of  science;  and 
the  reconciling  of  life  and  death  by  faith  re- 
established in  the  soul  of  the  world — will  be 
adventure  enough  to  last,  let  us  say,  a  thousand 
years  from  now. 

^'That  is  the  chance  of  youth,  standing  now 
at  the  open  door,  wondering  what  there  is  to 
do  and  which  way  to  take  to  meet  the  future. 
God  I  If  I  had  youth  again,  I  should  like  that 
good  adventure,  and  take  the  chance."^ 

You  cannot  be  cynical  or  reactionary  and 
redeem  the  world.  If  you  do  not  bring  better 
thinking,  better  ideals,  better  moral  powers  to 
the  age  than  it  now  has,  you  will  not  save  it 
from  ruin.  Old  men  are  trying  in  old  ways  to 
solve  old  problems  that  have  defied  the  old  solu- 
tions. Councils  and  cabinets  too  largely 
governed  by  old  traditions,  ruled  by  the  old 
spirit,  councils  and  cabinets  without  vision,  with- 
out faith,  without  insight  into  life  are  trying 
to  fix  up  a  world  full  of  hate  and  greed  and 

1  More  that  Must  be  Told. 


172  THIS  MIND 

suspicion,  a  world  full  of  race  pride,  race  pre- 
judice, and  race  ambition,  so  that  it  will  run  on 
a  while  longer  before  the  grand  smash.  Youth 
is  called  again  as  it  was  by  the  Master,  to  make 
a  new  earth  wherein  righteousness  will  dwell. 
Nothing  else  is  worth  doing.  This  is  the  great 
adventure.  I  envy  you  the  forty  years  that  lie 
ahead  of  you^  unless  you  strike  step  with  the 
false  leaders  and  join  the  wrong  crowd. 

Have  you  read  these  lines  showing  the  differ- 
ence between  the  sodden  old  order  and  the  sensi- 
tive new? 

"They  sit  at  home  and  they  dream  and  dally, 

Raking  the  embers  of  long-dead  years — 
But  ye  go  down  to  the  haunted  Valley, 

Light-hearted  pioneers. 
They  have  forgotten  they  ever  were  young. 

They  hear  your  songs  as  an  unknown  tongue.  .  . 
But  the  Flame  of  God  through  your  spirit  stirs. 

Adventurers — O  Adventurers !" 

But  England  needs  no  new  lands  or  seas. 
America  needs  no  new  continents  or  islands  for 
her  adventurers.  And  for  British  youth  and 
American  youth  there  is  an  adventure  that  Drake 
and  Raleigh  never  dreamed  of,  an  adventure  that 
only  men  like  Livingstone  and  Carey,  Coleridge 
Patteson  and  Hannington,  on  one  side  the  sea, 
men  like  Thoburn'  and  Bashford  on  our  side  of 
the  sea,  saw.     And  as  youth  sets  sail  to  make 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     173 

a  new  mind,  a  new  heart,  a  new  conscience,  a 
new  affection,  a  new  relation  in  the  whole  world, 
one  like  unto  the  Son  of  man  goes  with  them, 
at  their  head,  and  the  new  day  dawns  as  they 
move. 

5.  Your  life  decision  and  the  life  service  that 
follows  it  must  relate  you  vitally  and  strongly 
to  those  beliefs  that  make  a  victorious  life. 

One  of  my  wise  friends  wanted  me  to  make 
an  entire  lecture  on  this  subject.  He  feels  keenly, 
as  all  thoughtful  persons  do,  the  student  diffi- 
culty with  his  creed.  And  it  would  be  a  fine 
w^ork  to  help  clear  that  difficulty  out  of  the  way. 
Nevertheless  I  am  choosing  not  to  try  it.  There 
are  several  reasons.  That  subject  ought  to  make 
an  entire  volume  and  not  simpl}^  one  chapter 
in  a  volume.  Making  an  entire  chapter  out  of 
it  in  this  discussion  would  create  a  wrong  im- 
pression because  of  the  disproportionate  space 
given  it.  And  I  fear,  if  an  entire  chapter  should 
be  given  to  it,  that  I  might  be  tempted  to  make 
a  creed  for  you !  And  it  would  be  all  wrong  for 
me  to  assume  that  you  must  believe  at  your  age 
all  the  things  I  believe  at  mine,  or  that  we  should 
believe  even  the  same  things  exactly  alike.  Be- 
liefs are  so  related  to  experience  that  the  same 
words  do  not  mean  the  same  things  as  expe- 
rience ripens  and  deepens.  For  example,  all  my 
life  I  have  repeated  the  words  "I  believe  in  God 


174  THIS  MIND 

the  Father  Almighty'^ — and  do  still  repeat  them, 
but  they  mean  immeasurably  more  than  they  did 
in  my  youth,  and  I  cannot  see  what  wealth  they 
will  finally  come  to  have. 

These  are  days  when  many  people  are  having 
trouble  with  their  creeds,  when  many  are  pro- 
posing to  throw  all  creeds  overboard  and  go 
ahead  without  them.  This  does  not  seem  either 
wise  or  possible.  There  is  a  better  way.  Maybe 
we  can  find  it.  Suppose  we  start  with  three  or 
four  general  statements,  some  of  them  negative 
in  form.  First :  Beliefs  cannot  be  made  to  order, 
just  once  for  all.  They  will  grow  and  expand 
as  life  goes  on.  Second:  True  and  "productive 
beliefs'-  are  positive  and  not  negative.  A  man 
does  not  get  far  simply  on  the  basis  of  the  things 
he  does  not  believe.  Third :  Practically,  beliefs 
are  not  all  equally  important  or  useful,  not  all 
equally  used  in  one's  life.  There  is  a  working 
faith,  and,  for  most  people,  a  set  of  beliefs  which 
are  largely  kept  on  deposit  rather  than  in  circu- 
lation, beliefs  that  are  not  used  at  all.  Fourth : 
Do  not  think  you  must  abandon  essential  faith 
because  on  some  point  you  feel  you  must  differ 
from  your  fathers.  They  were  not  infallible  any 
more  than  you  are.  You  need  not  attribute  in- 
fallibility, therefore,  either  to  their  convictions 
or  your  own.  Especially  do  not  regard  your 
views  as  infallible  just  because  they  differ  from 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     175 

your  father's.  Fifth  :  Get  hold  of  the  business  of 
believing  at  the  end  of  privilege  instead  of  the 
end  of  duty.  I  do  not  mind  confessing  to  you 
that  I  spent  bitter,  rebellious  years,  in  early  life, 
over  the  feeling  that  the  Christian  doctrines,  the 
beliefs  of  the  church,  were  being  forced  on  me  as 
a  duty.  It  did  not  matter  whether  they  were 
true  or  false,  partly  true  or  partly  false.  That 
was  not  the  real  difficulty.  It  was  youth's  feel- 
ing of  rebellion  against  being  compelled  and 
not  free.  I  used  to  wish  that  scared  sheriff  of 
Philippi  had  not  asked  what  he  must  do  to  be 
saved.  All  that  has,  however,  been  gone  for 
many  happy  years.  There  came  a  day  when 
belief  as  a  privilege  came  above  the  horizon, 
when  the  duty  of  it  took  its  proper  place,  and 
the  freedom  to  believe  came  to  the  front.  That 
day  emancipation  came  for  myself  and  for  many 
besides.  For  from  that  high  hour  when  the  sun 
of  privilege  began  to  shine  in  the  sky  of  belief, 
I  have  tried  to  tell  college  men  and  women  how 
rich  they  are  in  the  things  they  are  permitted  to 
believe.  Donald  Hankey,  the  English  college 
man,  who  lived  so  nobly  and  died  so  bravely, 
cried  out,  'True  religion  is  betting  one's  life 
that  there  is  a  God."  Or  as  an  English  bishop 
has  just  said,  "It  is  staking  our  lives  that  the 
w^orld  is  God's  and  that  God  has  made  himself 
known  to  us  in  Jesus  Christ."     It  is  enough  to 


176  THIS  Mi:XD 

make  even  old  blood  run  fast  to  know  that  youth 
has  a  chance  to  bet  its  life  on  a  certainty  like 
that.  One  night  to  a  small  company  of  men  a 
bit  older  than  you,  Jesus  said,  ''He  that  hath 
seen  me  hath  seen  Him."  And  every  time  that 
personal  statement  gets  loose  in  a  chapel  full 
of  students,  the  cheer  leader  ought  to  call  for 
all  the  cheers  there  are  because  youth  has  a 
chance  to  begin  its  life  believing  in  a  God  who  is 
like  Jesus  Christ.  Mr.  Studdert  Kennedy  re- 
cently spoke  these  pungent  w^ords:  ''We  have 
really  changed  our  God.  We  have  ceased  bow- 
ing down  before  a  crowned  Person  sitting  on  a 
throne  surrounded  by  peaceful,  singing  angels. 
There  is  no  such  Person.  He  is  dead — killed 
long  ago.  The  God  we  worship  is  the  God  still 
suffering  over  the  sorrows  of  humanity,  the  God 
with  tears  in  his  heart  for  the  sorrows  of  this 
w^orld — the  God  who  is  like  Jesus  Christ."  It 
is  not  surprising  that  when  belief  comes  at  you 
the  wrong-end  foremost  it  arouses  opposition  and 
makes  itself  look  difficult.  But  when  it  comes 
right-end  foremost  it  is  the  finest  thing  on  this 
planet,  for  it  gives  men  and  women  a  power 
for  service,  a  strength  for  life  that  they  cannot 
afford  to  miss.  Beliefs  may  be  weights  to  drag 
you  down,  to  fetter,  to  impede,  or  they  may  be 
Avings  to  lift,  to  sustain,  to  carry  you  forward. 
If  I  had  nothing  to  say  to  you  except  a  stern 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     177 

word  about  the  hard  duty  of  belief  I  would  not 
be  saying  that,  but  because  I  can  proclaim  the 
glad,  free,  high  privilege  of  belief  it  is  a  joy  to 
speak. 

This  seems  to  be  the  way  Jesus  got  into  his 
beliefs,  not  simply  the  things  he  taught  other  men 
to  believe,  but  the  things  upon  which  he  rested 
his  own  imperial  life.  It  never  looks  like  an 
enforced  and  unwelcome  duty  to  him,  but  always 
like  a  sort  of  rapture  as  he  faced  his  real  life 
and  supreme  endeavor.  He,  like  you,  faced  his 
life  decision  and  lifework,  and  bore  into  the 
waiting  years  like  a  strong  man  into  battle,  be- 
cause he  believed  as  he  did.  He  has  transformed 
belief  from  duty  to  privilege.  He  knows  what 
it  is  worth.  He  exults  in  it.  I  do  not  lay  down 
a  body  of  statements  to-day  and  tell  you  that 
you  must  believe  them.  I  ask  you  to  look  at 
that  other  supreme  Believer  and  go  the  whole 
length  of  faith  with  him  as  a  royal  privilege. 

I  cannot  go  very  far  with  certain  creed-makers 
of  past  centuries,  but  I  can  go  the  whole  length 
of  Jesus'  belief  with  him.  He  gets  into  it  and 
gets  hold  of  it  the  right  way.  He  gets  hold  of 
the  things  that  seem  worth  while,  that  seem  to 
bear  directly  on  the  problem  of  living  and  work- 
ing. He  never  seems  to  regard  his  faith  as  a 
weight  or  a  perplexity  or  a  burden  to  him.  There 
are  places  where  he  almost  acts  as  if  he  were 


178  THIS  MIND 

about  to  shout  over  the  way  his  belief  carries 
him  through  a  task  which  would  be  impossible 
but  for  his  faith.  Things  do  not  all  look  equally 
important  to  him.  He  refuses  to  get  side-tracked 
by  unessential  questions.  He  keeps  on  the 
main  line  all  the  time.  He  does  not  stop  to 
examine  his  faith.  He  uses  it.  He  has  the  kind 
that  enables  him  to  keep  full  steam  ahead  while 
he  does  his  essential  work.  Into  it  with  him! 
You  do  not  know  yet  what  it  is  worth  to  you  to 
be  able  to  believe  certain  things.  Face  to  face 
with  the  task  of  making  a  new  humanity,  think 
how  fine  it  is  to  be  strong  in  this :  ^'I  believe  in 
God,  the  Father  Almighty.''  Face  to  face  with 
the  task  of  teaching  the  world  the  words  of 
eternal  life,  think  of  this :  "I  believe  in  the  words 
of  Jesus."  Face  to  face  with  the  world's  im- 
purity, its  bitter  hate,  its  cruel  selfishness,  think 
how  rich  you  are  in  such  belief  as  this :  "I  believe 
in  the  clean  heart;  I  believe  in  the  service  of 
love;  I  believe  in  the  unworldly  life."  Face  to 
face  with  the  world's  moral  confusion,  its  low 
and  broken  ethical  ideals,  the  practices  that 
ruin  life,  think  of  your  strength  for  your  re- 
demptive toil  in  any  field  because  you  can  say, 
"I  believe  in  the  beatitudes  and  in  the  new  life 
for  man."  This  is  not  hard  duty.  This  is  life's 
exalted  privilege.  That  way,,  with  Jesus,  I  want 
you  to  look  at  your  beliefs.    Believe  him,  believe 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     179 

with  him,  go  the  whole  length  of  faith  with 
him.  There  will  be  mysteries,  there  will  be  per- 
plexities and  difficulties,  but  this  way  with  him 
leads  to  assurance,  to  power,  and  to  victory. 
Your  creed  may  begin  by  being  brief  and  simple, 
but  this  way  with  him  leads  to  riches  of  belief 
that  cannot  now  be  told.  Only  be  very  sure  that 
as  you  face  your  life  decision  and  lifework  your 
beliefs  are  vital  because  they  are  personal.  If 
you  are  making  your  contact  with  belief  through 
Jesus  Christ,  there  can  be  no  uncertain  outcome. 

''Not  what,  but  tchom  I  do  believe, 

That,  in  my  darkest  hour  of  need, 

Hath  comfort  that  no  mortal  creed 
To  mortal  man  may  give — 
Not  what,  but  wliom! 

For  Christ  is  more  than  all  the  creeds. 

And  his  full  life  of  gentle  deeds 
Shall  all  the  creeds  outlive. 
Not  what  I  do  believe,  but  ivhom! 

WJio  walks  beside  me  in  the  gloom? 

Who  shares  the  burden  wearisome? 

Who  all  the  dim  way  doth  illume, 

And  bid  me  look  beyond  the  tomb 
The  larger  life  to  live? 
Not  what  I  do  believe,  but  whom! 
Not  what,  but  ivhoniF^ 

Howard  Bliss  gave  his  life  to  being  a  mis- 
sionary in  Syria.  Evidently  he  had  to  deal  with 
the  young  Syrian  on  a  very  direct  and  immediate 
basis.    This  was  his  last  word  to  his  generation 


180  THIS  MIND 

through   the   Atlantic   Monthly   a   few   months 
ago: 

"Does  Christ  save  you  from  your  sin  ? 
Call  Him  Saviour! 

"Does  He  free  you  from  the  slavery  of  your  pas- 
sions? 
Call  Him  Redeemer! 

"Does  He  teach  you  as  no  one  else  has  taught  you? 
Call  Him  Teacher! 

"Does  He  mold  and  master  your  life? 
Call  Him  Master! 

"Does  He  shine  upon  the  pathway  that  is  dark  to 
you? 
Call  Him  Guide ! 

^'Does  He  reveal  God  to  vou? 
Call  Him  the  Son  of  God ! 

"Does  He  reveal  Man? 
Call  Him  the  Son  of  Man !" 

"Or,  in  following  Him,  are  your  lips  silent  in  your 
incapacity  to  define  Him   and   His   influence 
upon  you? 
Call  Him  by  no  name,  but  follow  Him !" 

Finally:  Will  your  life  decision  and  the  life- 
work  that  follows  it  enable,  and  even  compel  you, 
to  make  "full,  perfect,  and  sufficient"  response 
to  the  everlasting  pressure  of  God's  life  upon 
your  own?    The  deepest  fact  in  all  personal  life 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     181 

is  the  direct  and  constant  action  of  God  upon 
it.  We  do  not  thrust  ourselves  unasked  upon 
him.  Long  before  any  of  us  answered  he  was 
calling.  Some  of  us  do  not  hear  him  clearly 
because  we  keep  too  far  aw^ay,  or  because  our 
ears  are  dull,  or  because  too  many  other  sounds 
distract  our  hearing.  But  no  passion  of  re- 
sponse that  the  best  of  us  will  ever  make  will 
come  anywhere  near  equaling  the  passion  of  his 
call  to  us.  We  do  not  set  the  current  of  service 
and  devotion  running.  We  do  not  create  all 
these  high  principles  and  try  to  force  them  upon 
him  as  though  he  had  not  thought  of 
them.  Jesus  is  not  the  living  definition  of  the 
devotion  we  have  created  and  offered  to  God. 
He  is  the  passionate  expression  in  personal  life 
of  God's  owm  devotion  to  human  life.  God 
offered  Jesus  to  us.  He  is  God's  eternal  call  to 
us,  God's  call  to  ever^^  one  of  us. 

Even  Jesus  felt  that.  "My  Father  worketh, 
and  I  work."  God  is  the  chief  Adventurer,  the 
supreme  Burden-Bearer,  the  most  self-sacrificing 
Person  in  his  universe.  He  knows  that  you  can- 
not do  any  great  work  in  the  world,  or  give 
any  great  idea  to  the  world,  unless  you  give  your- 
self to  it.  Nor  can  he.  The  cause  consumes  him 
as  it  must  consume  3^ou.  He  does  not  drive  men 
where  he  does  not  go.  He  calls  them  to  go  with 
him.    He  goes  across  No  Man's  Land  and  over 


182  THIS  MIND 

the  top  with  his  comrades.  I  have  tried  to  out- 
line the  principles  upon  which  your  life  decisions 
should  be  made,  but  all  the  while  I  have  had  in 
my  mind  that  "man  has  no  end  which  is  not  also 
God's'';  that  "all  the  great  flaming  enthusiasms 
of  history  have  been  born  of  God'^;  that  "the 
best  of  all  is  God  is  with  us."  I  have  not  been 
trying  to  create  a  philosophy  for  the  guidance  of 
youth.  If  these  addresses  should  be  read  by  any 
numbers  of  the  young  men  and  women  in 
America's  colleges,  I  should  not  want  them  to 
find  here  only  or  chiefly  my  views  as  to  their 
lives.  I  am  trying  to  find  Jesus'  way  into  his 
own  life  under  the  direct,  steady,  unhindered 
pressure  of  God  upon  his  life.  That  is  the  only 
philosophy  by  which  I  am  willing  to  have  the 
youth  of  to-day  guided  in  its  supreme  decision. 
I  have  tried  to  discover  Jesus'  response  to  God's 
will  on  one  hand  and  the  world's  need  on  the 
other.  And  in  his  spirit,  after  his  manner,  I 
want  modern  youth  to  make  its  response  with 
its  life.  His  response  led  him  to  absolute  devo- 
tion, to  white  and  shining  unselfishness,  to 
Calvary  and  its  cross  at  last.  And  you  can  think 
as  hard  as  you  wish,  can  look  squarely  at  all  the 
other  lives  of  history,  but  you  cannot  think  of 
another  life  equal  to  this.  He  had  one  life  to 
live,  one  death  to  die.  He  lived  and  died  as  such 
a  person  ought  to  have  done.    The  world  of  our 


TOWARD  LIFE'S  ESSENTIAL  TESTS     183 

clay,  like  the  world  of  his  earthly  day,  is  very 
weary  and  very  needy;  weary  of  everything  else, 
needy  of  him.  Our  day  is  still  his  day.  It  is  in 
our  hands  to  make  it  his  day  as  no  other  day 
has  ever  been.  I  am  not  saying  or  caring  much 
whether  you  shall  do  it  in  one  calling  or  an- 
other, but,  looking  at  Jesus  Christ  as  he  stands 
related  to  our  world  to-day,  looking  at  the  whole 
world  and  its  need  of  him,  in  these  breaking- 
years;  looking  at  you  with  the  future  in  your 
hearts  and  with  life  in  your  hands,  I  wait  as 
he  waits  to  hear  again  the  words  spoken  by  a 
young  scholar  long,  long  ago:  ^'Master,  I  will 
go  with  you  wherever  you  go.'' 

This  is  life's  fine  adventure.     Let  us  take  it 
with  him.     "Rise,  let  us  be  going." 


Princeton  Theological  ,,f,f '"'",ja,|lite[)|" 


1012  01250  5824 


Date  Due 

^ 

